In a world where some supporters can lose sleep over the fantasy teams they run, it seems natural to expect every player to want to become a manager but former Ireland defender Richard Dunne makes it abundantly clear these days that he simply has no interest.
Briefly you might take him for crazy but as he talks about his new life in Monaco, where he now lives with his wife and children, it quickly becomes clear that he could be on to something.
Dunne was in Dublin last night working as a Champions League panellist with TV3 and he says that he wants to work to earn a few bob and keep busy but, critically, there is no great pressure on the 36-year-old to carve out any new life for himself away from his family.
“I’m happy to do nothing,” he says, “happy to relax and spend time with the kids (Lyla (7) and 10-year-old Tayo) and live a normal life. When you’re playing football, you’re just preparing for a match or recovering from a match it’s not just the Saturday that you’re away – a lot of the days during the week you’re not doing things that you’d like to be doing. Now, it’s nice to just do whatever.
“I play football with friends every Monday, sometimes Thursdays; five-a-side. It’s about 15 minutes from the house. A couple of hours playing football and a couple of pints afterwards and that’s it . . . because even that hurts! You’d have a few aches and pains afterwards.”
Terrible
Other than that, he insists: “I don’t have the need to continue playing. I really enjoyed it and I was really happy when I finished. I’m not crying out to go back and be part of it again. It’s over. I’m not glad it’s over because everyone wishes they could play forever but I’ve done it and it’s finished and now I can just be happy and move on. I’m not chasing something that’s missing in my life.”
It was, he says, full-on in a way that few outside the bubble could really appreciate. “It’s very consuming. Whatever people have written or said or seen on the TV, it’s always 10 times worse for the player. They take it to heart so much more than anyone could probably believe. You just have this cloud around you that everything’s terrible.
“There’s no-one else around that actually thinks about how bad you’re feeling. If something happens and you lose a match, five or six days later you’re still trying to pull yourself out of it whereas anyone else who’s been at the match and watched or wrote about it, it’s over.
“It’s mentally draining as much as anything. I really enjoyed it, it was everything and it was my dream to play football (but) you think it’s the be-all and end-all of everything and then when you come out of it and step away, it doesn’t actually matter.”
The scale of his new-found perspective is remarkable. He might have been still playing professionally had QPR delivered on their promise of a new contract but the club changed its mind and, faced with the prospect of moving again, Dunne simply concluded that he had had enough.
Battered
France, he says, was supposed to be for a couple of months, to clear the head and revive a battered body, but having been married there, and then returned regularly for holidays, he and his wife Helen found that they increasingly liked the lifestyle; the fact that “football isn’t on the telly 24 hours a day”was among the positives.
He does not expect, he says, to go to Ireland’s games this June but feels the team can do well. “It will be a lot better than the last one, I’d imagine,” he says. “It’s a younger squad going into the tournament, they have grown as the group stages went on and the tournament itself is coming at the right time for Ireland. If you look at the results last month, our opponents aren’t shaping up too good, so we can take heart from that.
“The added bonus,” he continues, “is that three teams will (could) get out. One win will do it for us and I don’t think we have anyone to fear. There are four good teams in the group but we have as much a chance as anyone.”
Beyond that, he suggests, he does not really even have a plan. A fair few of his contemporaries have extended their shelf lives by heading to the newer, developing leagues and Dunne once spoke almost longingly about following Robbie Keane out to Los Angeles. It seems that it may have been the sun rather than the soccer that appealed.
The offers, in any case, never came. “Nah,” he says, “these clubs in America and India . . . they all want strikers. Unless I had a change of position, it wasn’t going to work out for me.”
When he says it now, there is not one hint of regret.
