Confessions of a thinking fan's manager

Profile / Damien Richardson: Mary Hannigan finds out how this season has already provided the best entries in a long and colourful football CV

Regardless of the outcome of tomorrow's FAI Cup final - when his Cork City side will attempt to complete the double by beating Drogheda United at Lansdowne Road - this season will, says Damien Richardson, go down as his most enjoyable and memorable in football.

Most regular folk struggle to find the words to describe their feelings at momentous times in their lives, but the 58-year-old Dubliner, aka Rico, isn't one of them. He, after all, is the man who once described the game as "a ballet of wondrous beauty choreographed by highly skilled performers, dramatising the conflict between good and evil that takes place in every heart".

He's not, then, likely to opt for "over the moon" to sum up how he felt when, last month, he led Cork City to their first league title since 1993, and the first of his managerial career.

When he's told that one website, dangerhere.com, has taken to calling him the Aristotle of football, he laughs loudly, insisting, "I don't even know who Harry Stottle is." But those who have perused his now legendary managerial programme notes, dating back to his time at Gillingham, will know that Richardson is as familiar with the works of the Greek philosopher as he is with flat back fours.

Did he, one wonders, spend the bulk of his youth devouring books?

"Well, I didn't like school, I hated the confinements of it," he says, "but English was always by far my favourite subject. I loved having good English teachers and that's what kept me sane in a schoolgoing era that sometimes wasn't pleasant," he says of his time at Donore Avenue and Drimnagh Castle.

"When I started doing programme notes at Gillingham it was just the usual mundane stuff, the same as at every club in the country. Just so banal, the same words, just in a different order. I decided I couldn't do this, so it started more as a bit of fun - but I was always amazed by how many people took them seriously and just thought I was being pretentious. They were, and are, just a bit of fun."

He brought that bit of fun back to Cork City - and the club's City Edition programme - in March of this year when, following the departure of Pat Dolan, he was appointed manager, having opted out of the game since leaving Shamrock Rovers in 2002, working instead as a pundit for TV3.

"I thought I had left that part of my life in the past, but this was the only job that would have got me back into it," he said of the club he managed for 18 months from 1993.

"I know it sounds somewhat dramatic, but there was a feeling of unfinished business because of the abrupt manner in which I left in 1994. I didn't realise it at the time but it left a little bit of a void in me, so the game against Derry (the league decider last month) finished that chapter very, very nicely - it filled that void. For me it was very satisfying, I looked upon it as a debt paid to the club because I felt I owed them something."

Rumours of demise greatly exaggerated

Are you an honorary Corkman now? Do you have the passport?

"Well, I have a business passport," he laughs. "You never become a Corkman, I'm afraid, but I have the business passport with Republic of Cork stamped on it. I'm happy enough with that."

Having been roundly criticised for failing to win the league with Shelbourne back in 1998, Richardson enjoyed a sense of personal redemption when Cork beat Derry in this season's decider at Turner's Cross.

"As I said to someone, I was a long time waiting for this, but when you're young these sort of things pass you by, you take them for granted - when you're old you learn to savour the moment, so it was all quite deliberate on my part. I kept the league waiting this long so I'd appreciate it," he laughs.

"I'd won two cup medals with Rovers as a player by the time I was 21 and it just seemed it was as easy as that, and of course it's not. So the fact that I waited so long for this made it all the sweeter."

The season, though, wasn't without its frights, not least when he was struck by a health scare back in September.

"It came from nowhere," he says. "Physically I was in great condition, but from nowhere came this shortness of breath. Luckily enough I did what most men don't do: I went to the doctor almost immediately and he sent me to the Bon Secours in Cork.

"They told me that I had blood clots on the lung, which was a life-threatening situation. I was in hospital for a week, missed the trip to Prague (for Cork's Uefa Cup game against Slavia Prague), which was just as well because if I'd flown I could have had a major problem. But I went straight back to work at Longford the following Sunday and I've had no problems since."

Rumours abounded at the time that Richardson was seriously ill, explaining, he says, why he chose to appear on RTÉ during their coverage of the Slavia Prague game. Live from the Bon Secours. In pyjamas.

"I hesitated in doing it," he laughs, "but the only reason I did was because of the rather dramatic way I didn't turn up for the game against Bray - so all the rumours started that I was unwell. A friend of my wife's in England went to the hairdressers in Gillingham and the hairdresser told her that I'd had a massive heart attack the day before.

"So I decided to do the television to let people see I was fine, although I had the hell slagged out of me for appearing in my pyjamas. Mind you, going to Longford the following week nearly killed me. It would have been fine if we were playing Lourdes or Fatima in Europe. . . but not Longford."

Big fish in a small pond with Gills

The health scare did, though, prompt him to "re-evaluate things", although he insists he'd already seen to it that football was no longer "all-consuming" in his life. "I think I have it at the right pitch now. When I'm in football I'm a football man, when I'm away from it I try not to think about it. What's helped me is that I've always meditated, every morning, since about the 1970s - but you wouldn't know it the way I go on on the sidelines.

"It was transcendental meditation I got into in England, but you adjust it to your needs over the years. It just helps me be myself. The hardship of this life is finding out who you actually are; anything that can send you inwards as opposed to hurtling you outwards helps you realise who you are and the type of person you are. The natural progression of that is developing yourself and that's been very beneficial to my football, to me - the two go hand in hand."

If he learned how to meditate in his time in England he also learned something of the cruelty of the game when, to the supporters' fury, he was released by Gillingham one year short of his 10th season with the club, a landmark that would have earned him a testimonial.

Having scored 100 goals for the club, only the third player in its history to do so, Richardson - who joined Gillingham from Shamrock Rovers in 1972 - had become something of a cult hero. "A loveable Irishman with a bit of a temper who could enchant the crowd with magical skills and wonderful goals, and who was the first Gills player to win a full international cap for 48 years," as one tribute to "Paddy The Magician" on a Gillingham website put it.

"But that was just the stark reality of the game," he says. "I understood and accepted those terms when I went in so I had no complaints over it. But, of course, for so many footballers, leaving the game and that cocooned lifestyle and stepping back in the normal world can be a shattering experience. It took me half a year before I started getting back to normal."

They were, though, happy times at Gillingham, he says. "Most definitely. Gillingham's in Kent, the garden of England, the perfect place to bring children up. Our three children were reared there, a gorgeous place. You could go to France or Holland or Belgium at the drop of a hat, yet you were only 25 miles south of London.

"The club itself, at that time, was small-minded andlacking in ambition, but it didn't make my time there any less pleasant. But I was a big fish in a small pool. I should have moved on, but in those days you were a prisoner of the club - you couldn't move unless they wanted you to move. But I wouldn't change it, it was very enjoyable."

When released by Gillingham, Richardson returned to the "normal world", combining playing for a string of non-league clubs with selling double-glazed windows.

"And I made more money at that than I ever did in football," he laughs. "I had a terrific four or five years, making very good money, driving my BMW, everything was great - and then Gillingham asked me to come back as youth-team manager.

"So I had to sell my BMW to drive a little Cavalier, and the fella I sold the BMW to lived around the corner from the ground, so there I was driving my two-year-old Cavalier past my bloody BMW outside his house every morning and I just thought, 'what have I done?'

"But the job at Gillingham was just too good to turn down. If football's in your blood you just have to accept that. I'm very lucky to have a wife who understands that and has willingly put up with it. That's been a big part of it. Maybe it was a mistake when I became manager of the club (in 1972) - I wasn't experienced enough. But I still wouldn't change that either, it was all part of learning."

After his largely unsuccessful spell in charge of Gillingham, Richardson returned to Ireland to embark on a managerial career that has taken him to Cork City, Cobh Ramblers, Shelbourne, Shamrock Rovers and back to Cork City. He has, he says, learnt so much through those years, although he concedes there is one skill he has yet to master - cooking.

"I'm living in an apartment here because my wife, Rita, is still in Dublin, but I've learnt to do spaghetti," he says, proudly. "And I can now open a microwave. Noelle, who does community stuff at the club, brings me in little dishes of stew, so I come home and put them in the microwave. After the first couple of times, a couple of explosions, I learnt how to use it. But I can tell you, it wasn't much fun scraping carrots off the top of my microwave. I probably should have taken them out of the tin, but I like my food chewy.

"I've set the fire alarm off twice in this apartment block," he says, his sense of shame somewhat obscured by the fact that he's tearfully laughing at the memory.

"They were all standing outside, but I got used to it by the second time so I just opened the door and told them it was alright, so they trundled back in in their dressing gowns, saying, 'Jaysus, we should have known Damien was cooking'."

Reluctantly banging his own bodhrán

When the time comes, then, when he leaves football, Richardson is unlikely to become Ireland's answer to Gordon Ramsey, although there may be a role for him on Can't Cook, Won't Cook. Nor, alas, is he likely to inherit Christy Moore's musical crown.

Is it true you played bodhrán for Captain Ward And The Rainbow, on a 1978 album by a folk band called Tundra?

"I did indeed," he says. "A couple of friends of mine were folk singers and we drove to this recording studio in north Wales on the worst weekend of the year, snow, everything, up to the top of this Welsh mountain, taking our lives in our hands. They recorded two songs. I did one bang of the bodhrán and that was it. They said, 'You could have done that in London'. I nearly throttled them. But one bang of the bodhrán led me into posterity - but it was a good bang, if you'll excuse the expression."

So it's not another career you might move into? "No. I'm the most unmusically talented individual you're ever likely to come across - I think I even misplaced the bang, it needed three takes. But it made the album really. And, I must say, I'm very pleasantly surprised you brought it up; it was something that my modesty would have prevented me from mentioning."

If you win the cup and complete the double will you celebrate with a bang of the bodhrán?

"Ah no, I think I'll leave that to the Rebel Army. My bodhrán-banging days are done."

The Pundit, the Philosopher and the Programme Notes . . .

Playing Career

Home Farm 1959-1965

Shamrock Rovers 1965-1972

Gillingham1972-1981

Republic of Ireland Three caps (1971-79)

Managerial Career

Gillingham1989-1992

Cork City1993-1994

Cobh Ramblers 1995

Shelbourne 1995-1998

Shamrock Rovers 1999-2002

Cork City 2005-

'Glenn Crowe, John O'Flynn, Stephen Geoghegan are great strikers - none of these players is trepidacious in front of goal.'

- Introducing TV3 viewers (and the English language) to a brand new word

'The interdepartmental choreography is not yet right.'

- On Bohemians' slow start to the season

'The realisation that the 'tache made me far too handsome for my own good offered me only two viable options: I could retain the facial ornamentation, and the adorability it provoked amongst the female species, or I could remove the hysteria-inducing objet d'art and allow the younger generation an unimpeded tryst with the fairer sex. As a spiritually mature individual I have long since divested myself of ego and the consequence of this state of almost permanent inner peace obviously meant that the 'tache belonged to a different era in my life. I hope my sincerity does full justice to the profundity of your inquiry.'

- His response to a question from the football website foot.ie on why he had shaved off his moustache

'If the remnants of my classical education at the sometimes not so tender hands of the Brothers of Donore Avenue and Drimnagh Castle serve me correctly, it was that Greek playmaker of old Epicurus who stated "the misfortune of the wise is better than the prosperity of the fool".'

- Richardson on . . . answers on a postcard, please