Striking form just at the right time

World Cup/Countdown: Millwall's Richard Sadlier tells Emmet Malone about an injury- plagued career that's back on a high.

The news came through on Monday. The message was left on an answering machine and passed on by flatmate and compatriot Robbie Ryan. The full back's own form at Millwall this season has prompted speculation that he might make an Irish squad, but it hurt a little that his friend Richard Sadlier had made it there first. Still, he hid it as he passed on the word and congratulated his friend.

It didn't take long after that. A few calls back home prompted more in return, and when Mick McCarthy named his 24-strong panel for next Wednesday's game against Russia early the next day things really started to get hectic.

A few days on and the 23-year-old from Ballinteer is still a little bemused by it all.

"I didn't expect any of it," he laughs, before taking a moment to cut short another of the regular outbursts of noise from his nearby mobile phone.

A few months ago, he insists, it all seemed far-fetched, but 17 goals in a surprisingly strong English First Division showing by Millwall has been enough to prompt McCarthy into taking a closer look. Right now, it seems, the big but "deceptively quick" striker is behind Gary Doherty in the queue to become the next Niall Quinn, but a good night in Lansdowne Road next week and that might start to change.

Down at his club's Bromley training ground the news that he and Steven Reid had both made the squad was met with general delight. His manager, Mark McGhee, took him aside and had a quiet word, told him it would be a big step up and that he'd be up against defenders much better than he's grown used to.

" 'Don't be overawed by any of it', was the message, and I'm not. But that's sitting here at home in my armchair; it might all change when I go out there with the other lads for the first time on Sunday morning."

Sadlier is not exactly an overnight sensation, though. Since leaving Dublin for Millwall more than five years ago he's always been regarded as one to keep an eye on. Injuries have done much to hold him back, however, and it is only in the last few months that he feels he is finally starting to fulfil his potential.

Within six months of arriving in south London he was handed his senior team debut although, as he reminisces about it now, it hardly sounds like the perfect birthday gift for the Dubliner who had just turned 18.

"To be honest," he says, "I don't even remember too much about it, not how I played or anything like that. That sort of stuff just went straight over my head.

"What I do remember, though, is the fact that I came on with 15 minutes to go and the crowd were all calling for the manager's head. They were more or less booing every player on the pitch, too.

"In the 15 minutes I was on one fan ran on from behind the goal to attack the referee, who was at the other end of the pitch, and another fella ran to the dugout at the halfway line to attack our manager. Both had come from the Millwall end.

"Then, afterwards, we were told to hang on in the players' bar for a good while longer than usual because there was a bit of trouble in the car park outside and it wouldn't have been too clever of us to go out. So, yeah, it was an eventful first game all right, but apart from the fact that it was Bristol City and we lost 2-1, I don't actually remember too much about the game itself."

By the end of the story he's laughing at it all, but five years on he insists that the day's events are untypical of a life at a club whose supporters have always had an unenviable reputation.

"To be honest," he says, "I don't think it's been any worse than any other club over that time. There is the odd incident, but nothing out of the ordinary. The difference here is that because Millwall has a bad name to start with the press jump on the smallest thing."

Still, life at the club has never been dull during his time there, with the turnover of managers, for a start, helping to keep Sadlier and the rest of the players on their toes. Jimmy Nicholl, who gave Sadlier his debut that day, ended up going within 10 days of the game. It was February, just about a year after he had replaced Mick McCarthy at the club, and no one, until the arrival of Mark McGhee, was to last much longer.

"I went on twice for 15 minutes under Nicholl," recalls Sadlier, "and then made my first start in March under John Docherty. He went that summer and Billy Bonds arrived, and then there was Keith Stevens, who was later joined by Alan McLeary as joint manager. It just went on like that until Mark arrived at the start of last season."

THAT, insists the Irishman, was when his own boat came in. McGhee, a former striker and one-time team-mate of McCarthy's at Celtic, took a particular interest in the forwards at the club, and while Sadlier was still recovering from a broken arm sustained in pre-season, the Dubliner quickly got a sense that this, the sixth manager of his still fledgling professional career, was the man he'd been waiting for.

"Things had never been helped by the injuries I'd had. When Bonds was here I played a few games at the start of the season, and was then out for 11 months with a hip/pelvis problem so I missed the whole of the rest of the season. Since then I've been unlucky really, and so there hadn't been a year when I'd played a lot of games or scored more than six, seven or eight goals."

Even last season his chances were limited by the strong form of the resident striking partnership of Paul Moody and Neil Harris, although, he admits, on those occasions when he was handed an opportunity to impress he generally passed it up by performing indifferently or picking up another minor knock.

Things changed last summer, though, when Moody, his main rival for the big striker's role, was sold to Oxford for £150,000. At the same time Harris was forced by illness to take a break from the game, and so suddenly Sadlier and Steve Claridge were, by default at least, McGhee's first-choice attacking partnership.

"It's great to be playing with the same person every week," says Sadlier, "and great that it's Steve because he's always trying to help me out. But I think that a big part of the change is that I've simply improved as a player myself. I don't like talking about myself as a player, I feel a bit of an eejit talking about technique or anything like that, but I've always wanted just to be better at scoring goals and I think I have got a lot better over the last year - it's a pity I didn't master it earlier," he adds with a sigh.

Not too much earlier, perhaps, for Sadlier admits that he would have struggled to cope with the attention he has been receiving recently. He and fellow former under-21 international, Robbie Ryan, with whom he shares his Bromley house, have received a constant stream of callers since Christmas. "Over the past week it just hasn't stopped."

The attention is, he admits, one of the trappings of a life he has been desperate to lead since he was a small boy. Like the homesickness that plagued him during his first few months in south London, it is, he realises, one of the realities of a livelihood that has fewer drawbacks than most.

And he has coped well, he reckons, even if he has generally had the advantage of feeling that things were moving steadily in the right direction for him.

Injuries have been the cause of some frustration, but overall he has had the opportunity to adapt gradually while former underage international team-mates like Damien Duff and Robbie Keane had stardom thrust upon them much earlier, and Stephen Roche, Keith Crawford, Peter Davis and Darren O'Keeffe, the former Belvedere Boys team-mates who also moved to Britain, found themselves back at home in Ireland without ever getting the chance they had hoped for.

Now, much sooner than he expected, he is faced with the prospect of taking another giant leap forward, both with Millwall and Ireland.

Continuing to score goals at his current rate at the New Den would go a long way towards maintaining the club's challenge for a placein the Premiership or, at the very least, attract attention from those already there. And performing well for McCarthy next Wednesday could still help to earn a place on the greatest stage.

On Millwall's promotion prospects he is cautiously optimistic. But pressed with regard to his World Cup hopes he is far more dismissive.

"It's a little hard to take seriously right now, because I haven't really gotten used to thinking of myself in that way. Like everybody else, I dream about playing for Ireland in a World Cup, but that's a long way from thinking seriously about whether it might happen or not.

"I've had some great times at Millwall, the Auto Windscreens final at Wembley a couple of years and winning the Second Division last year, but all of the highlights of my career are the times I've been with Ireland. Nigeria (World Youth Cup 1999) was fantastic, and getting to start for the under-21s against Holland in Waterford last year, after having had to pull out of so many squads with injuries, was brilliant. It doesn't matter whether it was Brian Kerr's set-up or Don Givens': the people you're playing with, who you're playing for, has made it special.

"Now people have been saying to me for a while that I might be in line to get a call-up for one of the friendlies and that I might end up at the World Cup, but it's always been journalists or fellas who come along to see Millwall. It's never been anybody from the FAI, never Mick McCarthy, never anybody important - eh, not that I mean any disrespect, but journalists don't pick teams.

"Hopefully, this will be the first of many times that I make the squad, but I'm very conscious of the fact that it could end up being my first and last call-up ever. So all I'm thinking right now is to do well enough in training next week to maybe get a game on Wednesday - which would be fantastic because my whole family will be there, my granny's coming up from Limerick and everything.

"After that," he adds, "doing well enough to be asked back would just be nice."