In the glory days of Jack Charlton’s Ireland, Tony Cascarino was the lanky battering ram who invariably popped up to score a last-ditch winner. Those goals were all sorts of ungainly – often he looked more likely to fall over than do anything useful – and yet he had a knack for sticking the ball in the net when it mattered.
He was also among the most complex and tortured people ever to put on a green jersey – arguably second only to Roy Keane in the pantheon of Irish soccer stars who wore their existential woes on their green sleeves.
The story of Keane and his seismic falling out with Mick McCarthy on the eve of the 2002 World Cup is to receive the big-screen treatment in the new movie, Saipan. But before that, Cascarino’s unlikely emergence as an Irish sporting hero is told in Tony Cascarino: Extra Time (RTÉ One, Monday 9.35pm).
Why unlikely? For one thing, he wasn’t sure if he was all that Irish. Cascarino’s muddled family history included a Mayo grandfather who turned out to be his great-grandfather (the woman his mother believed to be her sister was actually her mother). That put his Irish connection back a generation and beyond the eligibility criteria, and for a number of years, he believed that his glory years with Ireland were a sham.
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That actually wasn’t the case: the rules of international soccer make allowance for such situations. Yet the fact that Cascarino, who grew up in Kent, became so preoccupied with whether he was Irish or not speaks to his complexity. Plenty of sports stars would not have given it a second (or even first) thought.
“He was very sensitive,” recalls journalist Paul Kimmage, who told Cascarino’s story in the 2000 autobiography, Full Time: The Secret Life of Tony Cascarino. “Very, very bright ... that might have been the biggest misconception. As a person, he would be one of the best people I’ve ever met.”
Successful people often have demons. Few are as frank about them as Cascarino. Having failed a trial with Queens Park Rangers at the age of 16, he’d actually given up on soccer and was working as a hairdresser and bricklayer when he started banging in goals for a club in Kent. That brought him to the attention of the local big team, Gillingham and later Millwall and Aston Villa. Alas, the grander the team – and the higher the transfer fee – the louder the negative voices in his head.
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“A lot of players have big moves,” he says. “There are a lot of seeds of doubt in the head. I didn’t have expectations for six years at Gillingham.”
He continued to score with Ireland – most famously, perhaps, slotting away one of the penalties that saw the team win a 1990 World Cup quarter-final against Romania in Genoa.
But as acclaim came his way, his demons roared louder than ever. The celebrity status he enjoyed in Ireland brought temptations, and he admits to cheating on his wife with starry-eyed Boys in Green fans. “I tried to stay onside but more often than not I succumbed,” he says. “I was infected with the disease of me.”
His club career reached new heights with a surprise move to Marseilles – a side desperate to pick up a striker on a free transfer in the wake of a bribery scandal that had prevented them from signing new players. He thrived on the pitch even as his marriage crumpled – a situation not helped by his taking up with a local woman.
“I didn’t want my marriage to fail. I knew too much about failure,” he says, reading an extract from his memoir. He ended the relationship by leaving a note for his first wife, Sarah, on the kitchen table. “He doesn’t tell her. He leaves a note,” says Kimmage. “That’s so cruel.”
“He’s always been a pretty spontaneous sort of bloke, Cas,” says his Ireland team-mate and childhood friend Andy Townsend (they were in school together from age 11). “That was a tough time, when he left Sarah ... The fall out from that is pretty devastating for everyone. Himself too.”
Tony Cascarino: Extra Time is a fun valedictory for a fascinating player. There is one wrinkle, however, as the story turns to the failure of his relationship with his French second wife, Virginie. This ends with her moving to Tahiti, resulting in Cascarino not seeing his daughter, Maeva, for 11 years. “She was accusing him of hitting her,” says Cascarino’s sister, Amanda Cappuccio. “And then he got carted off by the police. It just felt fake. It all felt fake.”
Once raised, the subject of domestic violence is then set aside. But if the claims were without foundation, why include them in the first place? Conversely, if there was substance to the allegations, is Cascarino an appropriate subject for a documentary in the first place?
It is a curious note at the end of a gripping profile that doubles as a love letter to Italia 1990-era Ireland. What times those were. People could wave the flag with pride – it became the olé-olé-olé grail – and Ireland found a new identity as scrappy underdogs bestriding the world stage. Those days may never come back, but Tony Cascarino: Extra Time makes them feel so real again, you can almost reach out and touch them.
