SOCCER MEMOIRS: This is a book about a happy Irishman and an unhappy Irishman. The happy man is Niall Quinn, a not excessively talented professional soccer player who twice recovered from the sport's most feared injury, who drinks more than is good for him, and yet who played a key role in the Republic of Ireland's two most celebrated journeys to the final stages of a World Cup tournament.
The unhappy man is Roy Keane, one of the world's most brilliant footballers, a lonely, driven perfectionist with a seething temper and a gift for vitriolic abuse, who walked out on the chance of leading a group of largely mediocre soccer players to heights undreamt of by any Irish sporting team in living memory.
The tempestuous presence of the Manchester United captain is everywhere in this book. Its structure, which cross-cuts between episodes in Quinn's life and career and the extraordinary saga of Saipan and its aftermath, ensures that.
For this reader, the book contains the most fair-minded account of what Quinn calls the verbal "surgical slaughtering" of Mick McCarthy by Roy Keane in the Pacific island hotel that one is likely to read. It is difficult to disagree with his conclusion that if the team had not swung in behind their manager after Keane's brutal dissection of his personality and career, McCarthy would have been on the next plane home and there would have been "anarchy and chaos".
"Our captain and best player has effectively walked out on us for the second time in three days. Whatever is going on in his head, the team isn't coming first. Whatever his beef with Mick McCarthy, this isn't the time or the place. He has lost all sense of proportion. He's lost us."
A sense of proportion is one of the things that makes Niall Quinn a contented man. Another is his constant gratitude for the good things in his life: the way his boyhood dreams of a sporting career have come true; his capacity to dawdle, gamble, drink and idle his way through his early years in England; his wife, Gillian, for pulling him back from the brink of alcoholism that engulfed so many of his fellow- professionals; his unexpected return from two cruciate ligament injuries to a hugely satisfying (and lucrative) Indian summer to his career at Sunderland; his love of horses and hurling. He also has that rare thing: the self-awareness to recognise and understand the unreality of the "bubble of privilege" that is a top player's life in the contemporary game.
Roy Keane, on the other hand, is an extremist of the heart, one of those people almost entirely without a sense of proportion whose escapades make life interesting for others, often at the cost of their own emotional well-being. Quinn clearly has a soft spot for the sad, hard man from Mayfield. He says he could not be "a bird in the cage" of public controversy and victimhood the way Keane is. He sees a wildness stifled in him and wonders what he would be like "if he hadn't become the centre of an industry and been forced to close down so much of his personality". He cautions that Keane's "genius deserves the dignity of respect" and hopes "someday soon to pay money to see him play in an Irish jersey again".
Like a good Irishman, drink is another thing that Quinn enjoys (and Keane has had to abjure), although here again a sense of proportion and a strong-minded wife have clearly stopped him going over the edge.
However, he admits "a river of alcohol" runs through his career, and it is quite astonishing to this reader, a regular on the terraces for most of the past 40 years, how a top footballer such as Quinn manages to emerge from so many all-night binges to perform as a highly-tuned athlete week-in week-out for the best part of two decades.
You have to be pretty desperate for a drink in the early hours of the morning to dash to Heuston station to catch the first Waterford train so that you can be first in line when the bar opens 10 minutes after departure!
However, the overwhelming impression given by this book is of a man at peace with himself. He is grateful for the hand life has dealt him, and it shows in his dealings with his fellow professionals, with the fans, with an often mendacious media. It was no coincidence that it was he - and not the FAI - who led the ultimately abortive efforts at reconciliation between Keane and McCarthy in those horrible days after Saipan.
The wrathful and unresolved genius that is Roy Keane could learn a little about how to live from this easy-going big man.
Niall Quinn: The Autobiography. By Niall Quinn. Headline, 310pp. £17.99