The Irish lionheart defending England

Martin Keown was having his leg pulled. Standing on a landing at the top of a staircase at Arsenal's leafy training complex at St Albans in the Hertfordshire countryside, as Keown talked of Ireland, England, Arsenal and Euro 2000, a steady stream of team-mates, physios and backroom staff tugged at his body as they ascended and descended the stairs. Keown tried to keep the conversation flowing. In his best rural Ulster tones he said, smiling: "Go on ahead."

It is a remark he has clearly heard a lot, but then, given a Fermanagh father, a Galway mother, a classic Irish emigrant childhood and constant visits across the Irish Sea in his 33 years, he would do. It is far from a problem.

Keown, whose performances for Arsenal and England mark him out as a proud Englishman, is in fact something of a secret Irishman. His accent may be as southern English as Tony Blair's, but Keown's heart, face and history are definitely Irish. As he said: "People have told me I'm probably more Irish than half the Irish team. I don't know. I grew up in what was very much an Irish community. I had to listen to the Chieftains every Sunday morning with my cooked breakfast."

He laughed at that, but the joke turned out to be on Ireland. The commanding centre-half is a currency as strong as sterling, as Mick McCarthy knows to his cost. But Keown will be going to Euro 2000 as one of England's, when his presence in the Republic team may well have ensured that McCarthy was leading an Irish squad there. Think Macedonia, think injury-time corner, think free header. Think what might have been.

Keown does, though not so often these established, successful England days of his. His loyalty to the Three Lions has never been in question, even if his selection has at times. There have been times when he could understandably have felt unwanted by England. Between June 1993 and March 1997, between the ages of 27 and 30, Martin Keown did not kick a ball in an England shirt.

More importantly to Keown, having played for England at under-18 and under-21 level, he did not make his full debut until he was 26. "I could very easily have played for Ireland and at one stage efforts were made to try and switch to the Republic of Ireland. I thought, and the club felt, I'd have a better international chance. But the rules in those days were that if you played at under-18 level then that was that. The decision was made very young."

That ceiling was then raised by FIFA to under-21 level, but only after Keown had played it. If there is any Keown regret today it is well-buried - he has, after all, won 28 England caps - but in that fallow spell before his first senior appearance against France in 1992, Keown wondered about the injustice of having to choose so early.

"Between the ages of 21 and 26, in those five years I never played international football, and in that period Jackie Charlton tried to get me to play for them, to lift the ruling. Before I played for the under-21s I put a brake on it because I thought I could play for the Republic. Then they (FIFA) said I couldn't, then they changed the rules.

"It turned out to be a very good decision for me and when I play for England there is nobody more English than me. I don't think anyone could ever doubt my commitment. But I had a lot of relations, cousins and uncles who said to my father: `You know, we can't believe you let him play for England.' But my dad says: `This is the country you were born in and you make all your own decisions.' I think he's been proved right.

"I could actually have played for the North and the South. Really, in the early days when it was all Norman Whiteside, perhaps I could have gone and played for Northern Ireland. Pat Jennings was amazed there was no follow-up from Northern Ireland.

"Arsenal at the time had Don Howe (as manager) and there was very much an English element here. Terry Neill had just left. John Cartwright was an England coach, so was Don Howe - maybe I was pushed in that direction. It's a difficult decision for anyone to make when they're so young and for a long time it looked as though I'd made the wrong decision. But once I broke into the England team on the football front, I think, eventually, I made the right decision. Obviously I have got so many family members who are Irish, and if I have a holiday the first place I go to is Ireland. There will always be strong links. My children (Niall and Callum) could play for Ireland."

It is as if all Keown's lifetime choices have been informed by his Irishness. Now back in Fermanagh, his father Raymond, a steel-erector, and his mother Angela, a nurse, spent 40 years in England. They met there and settled in Oxford, where Keown said there was: "A big Irish community."

"It's a shame really, a lot of it has drifted away. There was an Irish club there, that's gone now, they just couldn't sustain it. A generation had come over and the children, like myself, adopted the English culture. So that disappeared. I think I felt Irish when I was young. Most of the people I went to school with had Irish parents. Some children spoke with Irish accents." When the time came to sign a professional contract, Keown went for Arsenal. "I think my mum and dad wanted me to come here because it was an Irish club, it had that look about it. There was Sammy Nelson, Pat Rice, Pat Jennings, David O'Leary, Liam Brady, Frank Stapleton, so many Irish players. That attracted a big Irish support. If you go to Ireland now it feels like 90 per cent support Man United, but that wasn't always the case. There was a big Arsenal pull."

The pull was not big enough to keep Keown, however. Shortly after George Graham's arrival in 1986, when Keown was 19 and already part of the first team, he was transferred to Aston Villa. Graham's notoriously tight-fisted approach to wages was the cause. Keown refused a pay rise he considered derisory. "It proved to be a bad decision," he says now. "But it was on a point of principle. I've always done things on that basis, I'm no different now. I'd battled for years to prove I was good enough. I felt I'd done that, I was 19, a regular for Arsenal. There is no way that would be allowed to happen today. I was allowed to slip through the net."

While he was away Arsenal won the league twice and the FA Cup. Keown spent three seasons at Villa Park before Colin Harvey took him to Everton. He spent three more years there before Graham finally brought Keown home to Highbury. It cost Arsenal u2 Stg£2 million. Keown also missed out on Arsenal's 1994 European Cup Winners' Cup triumph, the 1-0 victory over Parma. Like next Wednesday's UEFA Cup final against Galatasaray, Copenhagen was the venue. Keown failed a fitness test in the afternoon and Steve Morrow played, but Keown should not miss out again next week. An Arsene Wenger first choice, only Patrick Vieira has started more Arsenal games this season.

It is a measure of the peculiarity of Arsenal's season that even the winning of one of Europe's two trophies would be viewed as compensation rather than achievement. Arsenal were not in the UEFA Cup last August and only qualified after falling out of the Champions' League, as did Galatasaray. Similarly, Arsenal fell out of the championship race at places like Bradford and Middlesbrough. Yet if they beat Newcastle away tomorrow and then defeat

Galatasaray, Arsenal will have won the last 15 matches of the season.

It is a run Keown will want to maintain through the summer. Kevin Keegan announces his squad on Monday for the coming Brazil and Ukraine friendlies and Keown's is a certainty to be one of the 27 or so names. Given Tony Adams' proneness to injury this season, Keown is as likely a starter as Sol Campbell for England v Portugal on Monday, June 12th, in Eindhoven.

Although he was overlooked for Euro 96, it will be Keown's second European Championship finals. In 1992 in Sweden, Keown partnered Des Walker at the centre of Graham Taylor's England defence. A 0-0 draw with Denmark in the opening game was perceived as a disastrous result. Denmark, of course, went on to win the tournament. England lost to Sweden and went home. "The whole pressure thing snowballed after the Denmark game."

Keown's opinion is that knee-jerk reactions should be avoided: "You should learn from these things." Sometimes that is not so easy, yet as Keown said, he has often taken the "difficult" route. Not wearing a green jersey was the hardest of all.