“I’d put Eadestown memories up there with my Sunderland memories.”
Niall Quinn is a legend.
His English football career spanned three different decades over 19 years. He’s Ireland’s eighth most capped international player of all time. He’s been there for the good times, his name will never be forgotten.
All that doesn’t really matter when two points are at stake in a local GAA match. Nothing else matters at all, quite frankly, and you can do whatever the hell you like with your life outside of that pitch but you’ve no friends or adorers on the field in a different jersey in the heat of battle.
Football's po-faced response to Wayne Shaw's is hard to digest | @NiallQuinn22https://t.co/eq6rSbujer
— SportsJOE (@SportsJOEdotie) February 22, 2017
When Quinn retired from professional soccer and came back home, he took up Gaelic Football again and was soon brought back down to earth with a crashing bang.
In a truly insightful interview on Second Captains’ latest edition of The Player’s Chair, the Dubliner told the story of his full debut for Eadestown against Sallins and how a young goalkeeper made him realise there was a lot more going on outside of the bubble he had been living in.
The Irish hero won three penalties that day and put them all away – it didn’t make him particularly popular though.
“The last penalty, their umpire threw the green flag at me and told me to ‘get back to England, you diving b*st*rd’,” Quinn recalled on Second Captains.
Naturally, handbags took hold of proceedings after the game.
“I – as I would always do – swerved that and looked for someone to say hard luck to and I saw their goalkeeper,” he explained.
“So I went over to him and said, ‘listen, Jesus, hard luck there, young fella. I’m sure you would’ve liked to have saved one of them.’
“And he went, ‘f**k off, ya pr*ck, you wouldn’t take one against Spain.’
“I was brought back down to earth. There was this retired ‘hero’ thinking he was coming home to this adulation he had been accustomed to and good old Irish humour or wit – call it what you want – I was buried and put in my place.”
If you ever needed the GAA explaining to you, there’s a pretty decent insight right there. That sums up its competitiveness, it’s wit and the fact that, no matter who you are, we’re all the same in this way of life. There’s something magical in that that even Niall Quinn appreciates.
Now he’s coaching the senior ladies team.
Listen to the full interview here.
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