Worrying times giving Vinny a dose of the blues

AGAINST THE ODDS:His ailing health ensures our hero doesn't know where he'll be in 10 months, never mind 10 years – a bit like his beloved Everton.

A LOT of football folk tended to have a soft spot for Manchester City, simply because they existed in the shadow of all-conquering Manchester United, but Vinny Fitzpatrick had never been one of them.

Vinny hadn’t liked City when Peter Swales, a funny-looking gink with a bizarre comb-over, was writing million-pound cheques for ordinary players like Steve Daley and Kevin Reeves, and he didn’t like them now when they were bankrolled by Abu Dhabi’s black gold.

Vinny’s loyalties were royal blue, not sky blue for he was an Evertonian to the core.

The club of Eglinton and Farrell, of O’Neill and Donovan, Everton were the only club in England with links of tungsten to Ireland; they were also one of the few clubs in the Premier League whose backside was sticking out of their shorts.

A delayed start to the season which saw Everton lose at home to QPR on Saturday confirmed Vinny’s suspicions that his beloved Blues, the team with the longest unbroken top -flight service, could be facing a relegation scrap.

He’d seen them at Dalymount Park the previous Monday where they’d been held 1-1 by the part-timers of Bohemians and had left the ancestral home of Irish football with deep misgivings about the season in store.

The QPR loss, coupled with the side-effects of his radiation treatment for prostate cancer, had left Vinny less than sunny for the arrival on Sunday of his grown-up daughter Niamh – a product of a one-night liaison in Ranelagh in the early 80s.

Niamh had only appeared in Vinny’s life four months ago, shortly after the passing of her step-father, Harry, but the pair had hit it off instantly.

Like a lot of plain-looking parents, Vinny, for some reason, had fathered a daughter of stunning beauty; slender, raven-haired and ruby-lipped.

Niamh could have traipsed the catwalk for a living but instead inhabited the chief male domain of press boxes in north-west England as a sports journalist with the Manchester Evening News where her chief gig was covering City, whom she was mad about.

On Sunday, City were at Bolton and Niamh was due to file a 1,000-word analysis an hour after the final whistle on City’s Premier League prospects.

That she was doing so from deepest Dublin 3 rather than deepest Lancashire, Vinny found fascinating.

“It’s not unusual as these opinion pieces are often done from home anyway. As I’ve Monday off, I thought why not toddle over and watch the game with my old man, and see how he’s getting on,” she said squeezing Vinny’s fatted thigh.

“So how is life treating you, all things considered?”she added, her blue eyes watering slightly, not that Vinny noticed.

“I’m a bit like Everton at the moment,” he replied with a forced smile. “Slightly below where I’d like to be but it’s a long season and nothing, as they say, is won or lost in August.”

In truth, Vinny was feeling less than chipper. His appetite was becoming erratic, which was most unlike him, and he’d even forgone Angie’s offer of a free pass for Foley’s on Friday evening – which was utterly unheard of.

He tried to convince himself it was a consequence of the radiation – Doc Hume had warned him he would have good days and bad – but he had a nagging feeling that things were slipping away, a bit like Pádraig Harrington’s golf game.

Vinny hadn’t confided his fears to anyone, not even Angie, and he knew nothing would become clear either way for another three weeks when his course of treatment finished.

For the moment, he would grin and bear life, which was that bit easier having Niamh around, even if she was a City fan.

Vinny rarely watched a full game on the telly unless Everton were playing so he found it strange to be parked in front of the box for a 4.0 kick-off. Then again, he didn’t have much else to do right now.

Despite his deep-rooted bias against City, he found himself admiring their play which, like Niamh, was pleasing to the eye. City won 3-2 but should have hit Bolton for six.

As Niamh made notes, Vinny lobbed in his tuppence worth.

“If you ask me, City won’t win the league with Lescott in defence – he was only any use when he was with us at Goodison – but they might with Silva.

“Without doubt, he’s the finest City inside-forward since Peter Doherty helped them win the league in the 30s; a different type of player to Colin Bell, when they last won it, but he exerts a similar influence.

“He’s the conduit for everything going forward. It’s vital he stays fit. If I was Mancini, I wouldn’t play him in the Champions League, just on weekends.”

As Vinny spoke, Niamh tapped her fingers into her lap-top.

“Great stuff, Vinny. Your pertinent observations are already in cyber space, courtesy of Twitter.”

Vinny was taken aback.

“Don’t tell me you’re into that mullarkey, love,” he said in exasperation.

As Niamh tweeted away, Vinny thought of Liam ‘Baldy’ Hogan, a red-nosed veteran of Foley’s, who used to write for the Irish Press.

Baldy covered the Irish football scene for several years and often regaled the lads with bizarre tales of filing match reports from far-off places.

Once he’d been in Iceland in the early 60s and had to use the local Reykjavik operator to route him to his Dublin office via Aberdeen and London.

It had taken an age of clicks and whirls before an Irish accent finally came on the end of the line, saying “Hello, Irish Press”.

An exasperated Hogan blurted out “Hogan, sport,” only to hear the switchboard lady reply “I’m sorry, he’s in Iceland” and hang up.

Another time, Baldy was in Belfast for a Northern Ireland game where he discovered, much to his annoyance, no phone had been booked in the press box at Windsor Park.

With deadline time approaching, Baldy had knocked on a door outside the ground, said who he was, and asked permission to make a reverse charge phone call to Dublin.

“Yer man let me in, on the one condition,” recalled Baldy. “He said: “just remember you’re William in this house.”

Observing Niamh work, Vinny sensed the life and times of a sports journalist had changed since Baldy’s time.

He wondered if the job was easier as a result of modern technology. Probably not, he thought. If anything, the instant access to information through computers, mobile phones, never mind TV and radio, made it harder.

Everyone knew the Bolton-City result by six o’clock, so Niamh had to give her readers something different for the following day. What angle could she come up with that would draw readers?

“How will I know what you’ve written, love?” he asked.

“It’s easy,” explained Niamh. “Just log on to the MEN website tomorrow morning and it will be there, in all its glory. You can rate it out of ten and make a comment.”

Vinny thought about that for a minute.

“If I can read your article on-line, and everyone else can too, then who is buying the paper anymore?’

At that, Niamh studied her birth father. “That’s the rub, Vinny. Newspaper sales are slipping and the future for us hacks is on-line, not in hand. For the moment, we have enough readers who like the feel of a real paper but heaven’s knows where we will be in ten years?”

Vinny nodded but said nothing. He didn’t know where he’d be in 10 months, never mind 10 years, a bit like his beloved Everton.

Bets of the Week

1pteach-way Simon Dyson in the Johnnie Walker Championship (20/1 Skybet)

5ptsDublin (-3pts) to beat Donegal in All-Ireland SFC (11/10, Paddy Power).

Vinny's Bismark

2ptsLay Arsenal to beat Udinese over 90 minutes in Champions League (2/1, general, liabilities 4pts)