Quinn kills the 'Saint Niall' myth

Keith Duggan talks to Niall Quinn about his career, booze, the infamous Roy Keane saga and the origin of that "Niall Quinn's disco pants" chant.

Time to grab the saint and burn him at the stake. Nobody would be happier to see the end of Niall of Arc than the man himself. On that icy slope between 30 and 40, big, affable Quinny had begun to look back at a long (20 years and never less than 6ft 5in) sporting life and saw a phoney staring back at him. He knew how to smile sweetly at the cameras, to say the right thing, when to keep his mouth shut. He knew how to play the prankster who never got caught.

But he also knew what he really was and how he had come to be perceived. Big Quinny, what a guy. The Diana of the Premiership, the perfect family man. Ireland's scapegoat, her Neville Chamberlain in the torrid and mad negotiations in Saipan. "I Have in My Hands a Piece of Paper ..."

Actually, Brendan Menton had the piece of paper. Yikes! Disaster after disaster. It still leaves him empty.

With Irish soccer producing an entire generation of literary figures in the space of one month, big Niall had severe reservations about sitting down with his fountain pen. He nearly didn't do the book. But a couple of things gnawed at him. The Niall-as-Saint fiction. And Saipan. Always Saipan.

"I'd be lying if I said that Saipan didn't dominate my life for a few weeks and still does. At best, it bugs me, at worst I get downright depressed about it. I needn't have done this book and I really didn't want to go through it publicly again. But I decided if I was to do it, I would give as balanced an account as I could.

"I think I will always be a little bit down, as will everyone in the country, until Roy Keane wears a green shirt again. Because he is our best player. And never has a sporting incident caused such emotion and frenzy.

"So now that it is out, I hope people will trust that it is a level-headed account of what happened because I attach most of the blame to myself. I made horrendous errors out there.

"And maybe if one or two others can do that - it's a bit like Saipan in that we still need Roy to budge a bit. Because I believe Mick McCarthy would be willing to reciprocate even the slightest nudge at this stage. Not that I will be getting involved, I made a big enough mess first time round. But I will always be sad about it until I pay money to see Roy Keane in a green shirt again."

Quinn is at a loss to fully explain the collective loss of rationale on the tiny island. He was as bewildered as anybody else. "It was like our squad was torpedoed," he says. "I made a load of mistakes under pressure and I am so disappointed in myself. In retrospect, everything ought to have been done differently. Had we not called the press conference so soon after that infamous meeting, then something could have been worked out the next day.

"But it was just that what was said to Mick was ... he was slaughtered. And it wasn't the cursing or insults or whatever. It was just a sustained and incredible piece of oratory from Roy that left everyone speechless. It was surgical and Mick was on the floor. It was just so well put together in that Mick had no comeback. He dissected Mick and left him on the floor and I suppose we reacted to that. None of us had heard anything like it before and I suppose with the adrenaline, the natural reaction was to respond sooner rather than later."

Quinn has had no contact with Roy Keane since their public handshake as the Manchester United player left the field against Sunderland.

"It was a shame Alex (Ferguson) read that wrong because, had he sat back and let it happen, it might have been a first, small positive gesture. I was hoping we could move on - obviously the timing wasn't great, I appreciate that, but it was kind of typical of the whole bloody thing. Everything seems to go arseways when it comes to me and Roy. But I think he knows that I wasn't winding him up."

Roy has dominated Quinn's landscape since the days of his testimonial. Like everybody else, he finds Keane fascinating and throughout the book strives to portray him from what was a relatively-privileged insider's position. Quinn steadfastly refuses to lay the blame at Mick McCarthy's door and is now clinging on to the admittedly distant hope that time will heal.

"I think Roy has already moved in that he withdrew remarks made in an article to the effect that me and Stan could rot in hell. That in itself was something. So I don't know. You hope."

The needless furore surrounding Keane's absence from Quinn's testimonial was one of the many aspects of that event that left him deeply uncomfortable. It was another reason that he wrote the book, to put the record straight.

"I never put a hand in my pocket to give a penny to charity," he says. "It was other people, I just provided the mechanism. I just couldn't believe the response to it and in a way it was great, but I was unhappy that my family were put to the front.

"I whored my family in a way, got to appear in cheesy photographs and there was all this 'Niall is great, every other footballer is terrible'. And I knew it wasn't like that."

He knew. Quinn survived the vicissitudes of modern football through cunning, luck, selfishness, talent and hard work. He watched better players and guys that he knew to be genuinely nice, born gentlemen just fall through the lattice-work and he would think, "wow, that's a shame". And then he would forget about them. It was a narcissistic world in which he thrived and don't think big Niall didn't do his fair share of looking in the pond.

While it is inevitable that Saipan and World Cup 2002 dominates so much of the book, Quinn's story is absorbing and valuable in its own right. Written in collaboration with Tom Humphries of this newspaper, it is the early, almost neanderthal days of the crumbling first division where Quinn first cut his teeth as a lanky Dub in a duffle coat (that David Rocastle advised him to ditch) that resonate most strongly.

He is unique in that he learned his trade when footballers still adhered to the Shankly school of penitence and misery but has survived to thrive in the world of Ferraris and silly money that he still finds bewildering and amoral.

It is Quinn's wonderful memory for detail and the portrayal of what has been a mostly charmed life that make this account so worthwhile and rare. His first and most vivid close-up encounter with real glamour was when he arrived for a reserve game with Fulham. Clive Allen was doing a stint with the QPR reserves and Quinn watched him pull away from the ground in a Ford Capri with flashy stripes.

"The man has everything, I thought," marvelled the impressed young Irishman.

There are other great sketches of detail throughout - the first player he saw with a mobile phone was called Gus Caesar. George Graham, informing Quinn that he was being let go from Arsenal, turning in his office and saying, as a dark flourish, "Beware the Ides of March." And it was March 15th.

Inevitably, drink dominates the book. Quinn was a lucky boozer in that he consumed vast quantities without becoming an alcoholic. Through his pursuit of alcohol, he invariably found his way through the Irish centres of Holloway, Kilburn and Ealing.

His adventures in that half-intoxicating, half-sad world of London-Irish nightlife will strike a chord among the many Irish people who lived in Thatcherite England. Nights at the Pogues, days at training.

"I was fortunate in that I had been in pubs in Dublin and I had a bit of an edge, I could handle it a little bit better than most. And I knew my antics would never end up on the back of tabloids."

Some of the escapades he got up to with his fellow professionals are hilarious but often have an edge to them. A drinking spree thatended up in a drunken fight with former Liverpool hard man Steve McMahon is among the most memorable. It also, inadvertently, spawned the timeless classic terrace chant, "Niall Quinn's disco pants".

Both players were with Manchester City at the time and were on a pre-season tour of Italy. McMahon and Quinn got into a silly brawl, spurred on by the fact that Michael Carruth had just won gold for Ireland in the Olympics. They got separated and Quinn disappeared to drink in a club with newcomer Ricky Holden, where he performed the infamous disco dance in cut-off shorts that some supporters observed and immortalised in verse. Then McMahon reappears out of the blue and cuffs St Niall.

"I find my sense and, forgetting all about how this must appear to Rick Holden, I chase Steve out of the pub," he writes.

"Rick comes after me, putting on his sheriff's badge and looking determined to make the peace. When he comes out the fight is going well. Steve is on top of me about to kill me. I had a surprise manoeuvre up my sleeve, I'm sure - pretending to be dead already, perhaps.

"I am just about to turn the tables when Rick wrestles Steve off. I should thank Rick for saving my life, buy him a drink and continue our conversation. I really should. But Steve goes running down a back street and I follow him in a fury. Catching him is a surprise. This is the first time in my life I've ever caught somebody. I'm not sure what to do, so I push him. He gives way more easily than I expected, much more easily. In fact, he goes backwards through the plate-glass window of a tailor's shop.

"For a second, I think I've killed him. All this falling glass must have sliced an artery, lopped off a limb. Spiked his brain. He's lying there in a pile of toppled tailor's dummies and I'm staring at him, seeing headlines:

"Quinn Murders Club Captain"

"No More Mr Nice Guy, says beanpole striker."

"Rick has caught up with us. He too is staring at Steve and we're both thinking, 'Is he dead?' No, miraculously he's not. I am when Gillian finds out though."

Passages like this course through the book and reinforce Quinn's central theme of the privilege and irresponsibility that is the life of the professional footballer. He has seen the traditional values washed away in the tidal wave of new money, and while he has benefited personally, he sometimes fears for the future of the brash young kids who think making it is holding a set of keys to a Ferrari.

Quinn is a survivor, one of the lucky ones, and, at the age of 36 tomorrow, he is grateful to be able to say thanks. Sunderland visit Highbury tomorrow and Quinn hinted that it might be a neat way to end his career, but Peter Reid explained to him through a series of cheery expletives that he won't be hanging up his pants just yet.

But these are the last days of disco and, sooner of later, he will return to Ireland with his family to settle down and immerse himself in the GAA world that also reverberates so richly in his story.

"Peter has stopped me going back to matches because I tend to, eh, miss flights back. But I got to see most of the games at an Irish club in the summer.

"It's a great place, with people who have been in England for years and maybe can't afford to get back home for games.

"It is right in the shadow of St James Gate, Newcastle's ground, but you know, it is a different world to that of the Premiership.

"But, yeah, the GAA will always draw me back and I look forward to going to see the games again."

And who knows, maybe paying in to see Roy play at Lansdowne someday.

Stranger things have happened.

Niall Quinn, The Autobiography, is published by Headline (€22.99) and is available in bookshops from Monday.