Ancient Mariner

"I want to help in whatever way I can to bring it all about and to be here again having another meal, this time celebrating the really big one. Go for it lads, ye can do it."

It's not often you get a Premiership soccer player in Tipperary geeing up the county. But Niall Quinn put his shoulder to the Tipperary wheel at a function in Dundrum House last Saturday.

"If I could offer one small piece of advice," he continued, "it would be that mentally, you really believe that you can do it this year. An old football colleague at Arsenal, Paul Mariner, to whom I used listen a lot, always said that football

was about three things: "A third to do with the ball when you got it, a third to do with luck and a third desire."

Having lost to Galway in the 1983 All-Ireland Minor hurling final playing for Dublin, Quinn's past clearly doesn't stand in the way of giving support to his father Billy's home county.