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I could not make that call. Because even when we are starting to get lost in the fog
of alcohol, there is some voice that calls us back.
    At some level that I didn’t really comprehend at the time, I still knew that when a man is out drinking and he starts making elaborate plans, and he makes a certain commitment, he
doesn’t necessarily mean it. Even if he says on the night: ‘I mean it’. Especially if he says on the night: ‘I mean it’.
    And that voice which called me back was a good voice, a protective voice. Because of course the book that Paul and I would have produced at the time, given our mutual state of awareness about
the way we were, would have been a tad, shall we say, incomplete.
    The autobiography he would eventually produce with Vincent Hogan would become one of the most successful Irish sports books of all time. It would tell the story of a man who was coming to accept
his powerlessness over alcohol. But that would be nearly twenty years later, when Paul was ready for it. In the run-up to Euro 88, he wasn’t ready for it. And I wasn’t ready for it.
    Which was not something I knew for sure at the time, just an intuition that stopped me making that call.
    I’m sure that Paul understood, in fact I know that he did, because I would go on to interview him for Hot Press at the zenith of the Charlton years.
    It was still a rare thing for him to be interviewed, but he seemed to be in a good place that day in Bloom’s Hotel. He revealed that Jack used to call him ‘John’, perhaps
confusing him with John McGrath, who was the Southampton centre-half when Jack was a player. He joked about his knees. Indeed ...
    He never mentioned that ghost biography, and neither did I. Since he had agreed to do the interview it seemed self-evident that he had lost no sleep over it.
    But I wonder, I wonder ... if we’d had mobile phones back in 1988, or even a land-line in the flat, I wonder if I’d have made that call. And to what madness it might have led us.
    There is something to be said after all, for the phone in the hall.

T hey kept calling him a gruff Yorkshireman, but Jack Charlton wasn’t from Yorkshire at all, but from Northumberland. Famously, along with
Jack and his brother Bobby, the northeast mining town of Ashington had produced the Milburns, an illustrious football family related to the Charltons, and which included the celebrated Newcastle
Utd centre-forward Jackie Milburn, ‘Wor Jackie’.
    The Charltons were much closer to that Geordie tradition than to the gruff Yorkshire mould into which Jack had been placed by so many of his new admirers.
    It may be just that irresistible urge to embrace the cliché, but in Ireland, we think we’re better than that.
    Not that Jack himself would give a monkey’s, but we pride ourselves on knowing more about England than England knows about us. Thus if, say, Roy Keane were to be routinely described in the
British media as a Kerryman, we would shake our heads sadly at this new nadir in tabloid vulgarity. Because we would know that these are not minor matters; that for a very long time, we have been
obsessed with these questions of who we are and what we are and where we’re coming from.
    The first thing that Paddy says to Paddy when they meet on foreign soil, is ‘what part are you from?’ We have a deep understanding of these matters of identity as they relate to
ourselves, but beyond that, apparently we lose interest.
    Our self-absorption is that of a teenager, as is natural for the citizens of a young country. And our self-esteem has never been the best. In fact, as I learned more about the nature of
addiction, I came across a definition which has a haunting resonance for anyone with a drop of Irish blood in them — big ego, low self-esteem is the classic combination, the essential duality
in the psyche of the alcoholic.
    Big ego ... low self-esteem. Ah, yes, that would ring a few bells, for Paddy.
    So right from the start, our love for Paul