Quinn draws mighty support

SOCCER: The launch of a testimonial with a very welcome difference has been somewhat chaotic, Niall Quinn admits. But as the player and his extended team of helpers gathered in Dublin yesterday all the indications were that "A Night with Niall" will turn out to be a night to remember.

Tickets for the game, through which Quinn hopes to raise over £1 million sterling for two children's hospitals - Our Lady's in Crumlin and the Sunderland Royal - went on sale on at 10 o'clock Wednesday morning at £20 for adults, £10 for children. By noon the lines at a major call centre in England, where 47 of the staff are working on the project for free, had gone down under the weight of inquiries. By then £200,000 had been raised.

With characteristic modesty Quinn maintains that a sell-out crowd for the match is still far from a certainty. However, the reaction he has had from supporters of clubs both in England and here suggests otherwise.

The level of support he has received suggests that the 48,000 capacity at Sunderland's Stadium of Light may well be over-subscribed when the Republic of Ireland team arrive in the north east of England on May 14th.

With that in mind a secondary target, the result of a letter from a supporter who had read about the game in the paper, has been set and the hope now is to sell 100,000 "non-attendance" tickets. This would mean the game would top the British record for the sale of tickets for a sporting event, currently held by England's game against Scotland at Hampden Park in 1963 when 147,000 paid to see the tie.

Asked about whether he felt the game would set a trend in a world where well-paid players, often millionaires, have generally continued to pocket the bulk of the profits from testimonial games, Quinn said that, while cases differed, he hoped that some others might see the opportunity to make a difference.

"I think that Eric Cantona had a wonderful opportunity to do something when he left Manchester United and I'm sure it would have been 10 times as big as anything I might manage with this.

"Likewise somebody like Alan Shearer, who might end up retiring after six years at Newcastle (the standard requirement for a testimonial is 10), something like this would be something he could do.

"In the end it might prick a few consciences, who knows," Quinn adds, "but I know that it's eased mine because I've had 18 years in dreamland."

He has, he says, been surprised and more than a little embarrassed by the level of recognition he has received for his gesture and laughs at the sense of shock he felt when he " turned on the teletext to check the racing results and the newsreader was saying that they were going over to Westminster where the Tony Blair had given a first hint of support for Sunderland over Newcastle.

"I thought to myself 'this should be interesting' so I turned off the text to look at it and the next thing there he was talking about me.

"I'd be lying if I said that didn't get to me even a little bit and I was very touched when I got a handwritten note from (the Chancellor of the Exchequer) Gordon Brown, who has had his problems lately, thanking me for what I was doing."

The reaction from less well-known figures has been no less enthusiastic, with the result that Yvonne Storey, the Sunderland press officer, has had to hand one of her staff the full-time task of replying to laudatory letters to Quinn.

"It's been unbelievable, the reaction we've had to the whole thing, and we're snowed under with it," she beams, "but Niall rings every day to apologise for all of the extra work he's caused."

Quinn is proud he plays "for a club that would do this for me. Or that Mick McCarthy would agree to play the game so close to the World Cup when he thought that I was getting all of the money, nobody had told him about the charity end of things.

"But then when I think about it I can't figure out how on earth I could have got to here, to 88 caps. Although . . . games like last night's (against Russia) certainly help."

[ www.niall-quinn.com ]