OUR STORY 2 page

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 469.

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We thought pushing Mark into the shower was just a bit of fun, explains Kian, but it wasn't to him. The name-calling was hurtful. I'm very glad to say that despite this we very quickly became good friends, hanging around with each other, great mates. Mark had a difficult time with certain people. A little bit because of his weight, but also because he was a singer, he was quiet, he was from the country - you know, he did different things from everyone else. I was a good sports player, I was good at Gaelic football; when I was 17, I played in the All Ireland quarter finals, and that sportiness always helps a kid at school. Even then, the rougher edges of my childhood sometimes spilled over into my sports. In that All Ireland game, two great big buffs from the country ran full pelt and sandwiched me. These guys must have been up at six lifting hay bales and spent all day eating potatoes and cabbage. Jesus, it hurt. I got straight up and headbutted the pair of them. Well, that was that - banned for three months. Mark was in my class and I started hanging round with him when I was 14. By then I'd progressed from my sister's variety shows to musicals at the school and the local theatre. That's when I started hanging out with Shane, who was a year older than me - during break-time and through rehearsing these musicals. You might not think that getting into musicals was particularly a good idea for someone like me, with all the situations I got from the Sligo hard knocks. But do you know what? We made it look good! The Hawks Well Theatre plays a big part in my story and that of Westlife, explains Mark. I had front-row tickets to a production of Grease - my first musical - with my mum, her sister and her kids. These cousins, the Normans, were all really talented actresses, so they loved going to the theatre. This first time I went along I was so excited, and as soon as I saw the stage itself, I wanted to be on it. Then the musical started and out walked this tiny fucking pipsqueak followed by a slightly less tiny but greasier bastard with long grungy hair. It was Shane and Kian. They were the T-Birds and I couldn't believe how good they were. I was mesmerized by Shane's voice. He sang 'We Go Together' and it was incredible. I actually knew of him from school. He had a floppy haircut and all the girls fancied him. We weren't close mates, yet somehow that made it all the more amazing - this kid from school who could sing like this. Even back in the day, he had that perfect voice. The dance moves were also perfectly done. He was a natural. I was blown away, basically. When I saw Shane out there on the stage, for me that was the start of Westlife. Kian was the rock child, the grungy one with the long hair, the edge. He had long brown hair all over his face, even though he was in Grease. But he had a real presence, a real charm about him. The girls all fancied him too. The two of them were brilliant and that night, that performance, made me want to be on stage for life. There were only really two little parts in Grease for me and Kian, says Shane. Mary had pretty much made the roles for us. She knew we had talent and that we were up for a challenge. As I said, I was Danny Zuko's younger brother, and she put us two on stage for this one little song. On the first night, I was very nervous, but after that it was just like, Oh my God, I love this! We came on and it was all very cute. You could see people thinking, Ah, look at the two little lads. But we were deadly serious. That was my first big moment on stage and I remember absolutely loving it. There were 400 people there and, for me, this was the big time. After seeing Shane and Kian in Grease, I was desperate to get my own first role, continues Mark. There was a classifieds section in the local paper called 'Bits and Pieces' that listed anything from 'Happy 40th Birthday, Kaye, from the boys,' to notices of weddings and adverts for auditions. I would literally scan this section every week, all excited, hoping to find something I could audition for. That shows how little I knew about the business - getting a part in one of these musicals seemed so distant, so impossible. Yet, looking back, all I needed to do was walk into the foyer of the theatre, find out the director and ask for a part. I never had any formal training, I just learned by listening and singing. It was just a pure, bare love of singing. My parents didn't push me and they didn't pull me back, either. They just catered for the fact that I was banging on about singing 24/7 - talked about it and lived it and breathed it even back then. I was infatuated by it. I do have a tendency to latch on to things in life, especially if I find something that I love or someone who perhaps can say things I'm struggling to articulate, and that's what singing did for me. The first real musical opportunity was the school production of Annie Get your Gun. I went to the auditions for that and sang a few tunes, and the teacher just nodded and said, 'Fine, Feehily, you're in.' Simple as that. He had to get through like 200 students, but he probably had an inkling I had a bit of a voice - or maybe he was only doing it to keep out the people who were really, really bad. But I felt like I was being offered a place in some big drama school or something. It felt like a huge step up. Shane was in the same musical, playing a woman called Jessie. So was Kian. Because it was an all-boys school, you had all these burly Irish teenagers in drag. Initially, I was too shy to go up and talk to him. Shane and Kian were quite cool at school. Shane was popular with the guys and the girls. Kian used to get in a bit of trouble with the guys because all their girlfriends fancied him, while Shane somehow managed to be cool with the guys and the girls. Eventually I plucked up the courage to speak to him. I'd seen Mark in a couple of talent shows and I knew he was amazing, remembers Shane. He more or less had a black person's soul voice, like. He had this R&B soulful tone. He stood out like a sore thumb. We quickly realized how much we both liked singing, continues Mark, and I think we respected each other as a result. We started hanging out away from school. We'd often go down town to get a takeaway and share a large curry with, like, ten people. Then one day Shane said, 'Why don't you come over to my house on Saturday?' and we started forming a friendship between just the two of us. I started doing musicals, some with Shane and some without. I really enjoyed the camaraderie backstage and the way everyone knew each other. Living in the country like I did, I used to spend a fair bit of time by myself - not so much when I got home, but on the long walk back from school down the lanes, thinking. The musicals were brilliant because they were so lively and there always someone who would stay behind after the show or go out. You never had to be by yourself. I used to love that element of it. Everyone was friends with everyone, it was an amazingly pure and enjoyable atmosphere. Plus, when you performed, no one was reviewing you or criticizing you. It was a small town musical and everyone wanted it to be perfect, but at the same time you weren't being scrutinized. Even when they handed out the lead roles, people who'd hoped to get that part but hadn't weren't bitchy or nasty, they were pleased for the other person. There was a certain innocence to it, it was all purely for fun and enjoyment, and we always seemed to get applauded. I was the lead a few times, though I wasn't so good when it came to acting. In fact I used to curl up and die when I had to act - still do, sometimes, when I'm on telly. But if it was singing, I loved it. My biggest role so far, explains Shane, came as the Artful Dodger in Oliver Twist, another school production. The Dodger is such a great part and it was the first time I had to act and sing and I loved it, I loved learning the script and trying all the accents, the whole she- bang. Kian was in that too. There was no happier place to be ... not school, football, rugby. None of it came within a whisker of being on stage. I started to build my confidence and the girls seemed to like my performances, but I knew I must be getting quite good when a few of the lads came up to me and said, 'Shane, that was dead good, fella.' There was a TV show in Ireland, says Mark, called Go for It, and they had a sort of 'Name That Tune' segment. At the end, a random member of the public got up and sang a song, sometimes with celebrities. It was brilliant. I was walking along the street one day with Shane, talking about the show, and I said, 'If they asked us, if our numbers came up, would you go for it with me?' 'Absolutely, I would,' he replied. At that precise moment, I realized that here was a kid in my neighbourhood who loved singing as much as me and would, given half a chance, literally go for it, and with me. I remember walking beside him thinking, He's cool, everyone likes him, he's an amazing singer and he wants to do something with the singing with me... We'd done Grease at the college, recalls Shane, and then Mary wanted to put on a bigger version in the town. This was a mixed production, so she was able to bring in girls to sing alongside myself and Kian. She gave Kian and me the role of the T-Birds. We did our thing and it went down a storm. Everyone was talking about the T-Birds - people proper loved it! So Mary decided to put Grease back on in the New Year. I was doing all these shows, recalls Kian, like Grease, Annie Get Your Gun and Oliver, as well as still playing in rock bands and doing the poetry competitions. It wasn't sneered at for boys to sing in our area, or in Ireland generally. The mixture of Irish musical culture and Sligo's own musical scene meant there were singers everywhere. It was OK for boys to sing. And in a small-town kinda way, we became sort of famous as the T-Birds. All the girls in the school fancied us. That didn't win us any popularity competitions with the boys, obviously, but we loved it. All the girls from town did fancy those two, Kian's right, agrees Mark. A lot of them were coming to the show just to see Shane and Kian as the T-Birds, that's how good they were. I wasn't in the T-Birds, but I was still hanging out with everyone in the production. We'd all started getting a bit of a bug for it, it was brilliant. I was seeing quite a bit of Shane by this time and we'd become good friends. One day we were round someone's house watching Boyzone and Take That on the telly, some concert footage, and that's when the idea of starting a boy band came up. It was very much a group thing; I don't know if any of us would have done it by ourselves. But we were constantly talking about music, singing songs and messing about with pop songs during and after the rehearsals for the various musicals. I realized that although our voices were very different, Shane and me were harmonizing really well. It sounded great. Well, it wasn't that it sounded amazing, just that it didn't sound too bad! So we started mucking about with the idea of a boy band. One day, after we'd done the T-Birds thing, says Kian, Shane came up to me. 'Hey, Kian, we're thinking of putting a boy band together for the next talent contest and we'd like you to be in it.' 'Are you off your fucking rocker? A boy band? Me? I'm in three rock bands for that talent contest. I'm the lead guitar player in one band, I'm the singer in another band and I'm the guitar player and singer in the other band. I can't be in a boy band!' That was my gut reaction. Then I heard some tunes by the Backstreet Boys. Now, you might think it's a big leap from listening to Metallica and Pearl Jam to the Backstreet Boys, and I'll grant you it is. However, the guy behind some of the biggest Backstreet Boys tunes, Max Martin, was a complete metal freak. He loved his rock music and if you listen to those tunes again, you'll hear all sorts of heavy riffing and distortion behind the pop tunes. Maybe nobody else would agree with me on that, but that's why I liked what I heard. It got me intrigued. Suddenly, I quite liked the idea of a boy band. I certainly liked the idea of being in a band that was more popular than Pyromania and in the T-Birds I was get- ting a reaction on stage like I'd never gotten before just singing and dancing. So I spoke to Mark and Shane about their band. That was the start of our first boy band, Six As One. In the New Year, says Mark, the follow-on production of Grease was sold out. Because of the reaction to the T-Birds, it had been arranged that during the interval of the show we would come on as this new boy band. There were six of us: myself, Shane, Kian, Derek Lacey, Graham Keighron and Michael 'Miggles' Garrett, all local lads. The plan was to do two songs by the Backstreet Boys, 'I'll Never Break Your Heart' and 'We've Got It Goin' On'. We weren't sure how people would react, but the place went nuts! Really, it was just the most amazing reaction. We couldn't believe it. Then Mary suggested that we put on a full concert as Six as One. We rehearsed all day every day for weeks, learning songs by other boy bands. We were really focused. Come the day of our own show, there were about 500 people in the hall. It felt like about 500,000 - oh my God, it was incredible. The noise they made and the reaction was brilliant. It felt like we were playing Hyde bloody Park! There is actual footage of the gig somewhere and looking at it now it looks really amateur, but it felt so big to us at the time and it was an important starting-point. It all kind of happened scarily easy. We loved doing it, having some drinks at the weekend and chatting about it too, and there was real ambition there - as soon as that night was over, it was just like, Right, what are we doing next? Mary McDonagh came to us after that concert and suggested we do some recordings. By this point, we'd changed our name to IOYOU. I'd started to write a song called Together Girl Forever', which was about Shane's future wife Gillian, but I said to him, 'You're the one who likes her, you write the second verse!' I was really keen on Gillian by that point, says Shane, so it was great to write a song about her. Some of the lads did the music for it and Mark did the lyrics. It wasn't the greatest song you've ever heard - it was all very simple - but it was another step forward. So we took that song and 'Everlasting Love' and another original which featured Graham rapping at one point, and went in to record them. We were so excited, that was our very first experience of any kind of studio work. It was just a small home studio and the set-up was nothing like the studios we use now, but it was cool. We were singing into mics and listening back and all saying the same thing: 'Do I really sound like that?' The songs weren't written or produced to the level we are used to now, says Mark, but at the time it was all very relevant and important to get us to the next stage. That little phase literally did do wonders for us. Having our own record felt like the biggest deal ever. We all had haircuts done especially for the cover. Mine was hideous, so as soon as I could I went to the local barber and had it cut off! About 100 people bought the record from the store in the first few days, then a few more days went by and another 100 copies sold, then 500, then eventually, after several weeks, we'd shifted about 1,000 of them. Suddenly, the word of mouth in town was like, There's a new boy band and they're from Sligo!' It was all very small scale, but people really got into it, they loved the idea. Mainly girls, actually. At the time, the Backstreet Boys and Boyzone were at their peak, so the idea of Sligo having its own boy band - well, all the local girls loved it. A while later, Mary McDonagh and her associates offered us a management contract which we had to decide whether to sign or not. It was an amazing time. It was all a great laugh and yet serious at the same time, we meant business. It seemed so quick too - singing in the interval of Grease, then getting our own show, then recording in a studio, then having a record out... Every step, we felt, If it all stops tomorrow, this has already been amazing! Next thing we knew, we got asked to go on a TV show called Nationwide, a magazine show where one week there'd be a young kid doing stunts on a BMX and the next week there'd be an Irish dancing troupe. That week it was us, singing carols in a local children's ward. The TV crew came down and filmed us. They liked it and broadcast the clip at teatime and everyone in Sligo seemed to watch it. It was mad. People in the street even started to say hello. 'Hey, that's yer man from that band!' Oddly, despite going on Nationwide and being known as a new local boy band, there was then a bit of an anti-climax, we sort of stalled for a wee while. Shane went to college five hours away from Sligo and we were kinda kicking our heels, like, That was fun. What now?

Chapter Three

A Game of Two Halves

We never wanted for anything in our house, but money certainly didn't grow on trees, says Dubliner Nicky Byrne. I think my mam and dad, Nikki and Yvonne Byrne, were very proud parents. My dad was a painter and decorator working in an hotel at Dublin airport and my mam was a housewife. I came into the world on 9 October 1978, my sister Gillian is two years older than me and when I was 11 they had a surprise little brother for us all, Adam. No one knew if we were rich or poor, but if I needed new football boots or Gillian was after some new Irish dancing shoes, we got them. Growing up, my dad was a singer in a cabaret band. Even to this day he sings. Back then he gigged seven nights of the week, working in lots of pubs and clubs around the city. I loved watching him singing. Sometimes I'd see him go out after dinner to his next show. He'd be wearing his white or blue suits ready for the cabaret. He was the lead singer of Nikki & the Studz and for over ten years they had a residence round the corner in the local pub, the Racecourse in Baldoyle, every Friday, Saturday and Sunday. He used to do a lot of weddings, dinner dances, all that type of thing. He was well known on the Dublin cabaret circuit, me dad. He wasn't a nationally famous singer, but people around and about knew of him. He worked his ass off to provide for us, definitely. He'd take me to football three nights a week and my mam would take Gill to Irish dancing competitions, while having to feed and school us too. It was a busy household. My dad worked in the Dublin Airport hotel for 17 years before becoming unemployed. I was only a kid and probably didn't understand what being unemployed meant. I heard about it on the news and I know now that there were some horrendous times for people in the 1980s. But as a child, I never felt it, I never saw it, other than on the telly. I remember times when my dad wouldn't be working for a while, then suddenly he'd go out and work on a contract with somebody for, say, six months, then he'd be off work again. My mam had four sisters - Betty, Marie, Con and Bernadette - and they all had children, our cousins. Every Sunday we'd eat at my nana and granddad's and every Saturday we'd go to my Nana Byrne for her special soup. I have very early memories of crowding around the Christmas tree in Nana and Granddad's tiny living room, opening presents. 'Here you go, Nico. Happy Christmas.' We used to take it in turns each year to hand out the wrapped-up parcels. It's a lovely memory. Everyone got a pressie - even the uncles got socks or 'smellies', as they would say. My first love was always football. I was a goalkeeper. My dad used to take me to as many games as he could manage. Then he got me into a schoolboy club in Ireland called Home Farm that was quite well known. He took me to training two or three evenings a week and to the matches at weekends, while he was decorating in the day and gigging at night. I really laugh now, thinking of the car journeys home after we'd lost or I'd made a mistake. While the lads we were dropping off - usually Brian Rickard and Paul Irwin, still mates to this day - were still in the car, Dad would sit there for a while not saying much, then suddenly he'd go, 'What happened there for the second goal, Nico?' There would be a long pause as I thought of an excuse and then he would continue, 'I think you could have probably done better there, son.' It was funny. Football was my life - I could name the Manchester United team backwards and upside down in those days. It meant everything. My bedroom wall was covered in posters of football stars - players like Lee Sharpe and Packie Bonner - and there was also one of Kylie Minogue and one of a girl out of Baywatch with especially big breasts called Erika Eleniak. It was mainly footballers, though. I was obviously aware of the big pop bands. My sister wanted to sing; she was a huge Bros fan. She wore the bottle tops on the Dr Martens, the leather jackets, ripped jeans, all of that. Bros were really the guinea pigs for what Take That, Boyzone and Westlife all went on to do. That was when the whole boy band thing first entered my world, I suppose. One Christmas my sister got a three-in-one music player from Santa, which was a cassette player, record player and radio. At first she played Band Aid's 'Do They Know It's Christmas?' then 'When Will I Be Famous?', 'Cat among the Pigeons', all those Bros tunes. As we grew up I would hear A-Ha and Michael Jackson too. At school, however, music wasn't really my thing. I didn't play an instrument and at that age I wasn't at all interested in the classical music they focused on. My music teacher, Miss Murphy, was lovely and I had a great relationship with her, not because I was particularly musical but more because I was friendly and charming to her, I suppose. I love classical music now - the sound of strings is one of the most beautiful, relaxing things you can hear - but as a kid, you're not interested really, are you? I was a confident kid, playing football, messing around, having a good time, but I wasn't confident enough to sing in public. I was always in choirs, but that wasn't just me standing there. When it came to my music exam, I was convinced I was going to fail, but luckily 40 per cent of it was practical, just singing. I stood up and sang 'The Fields of Athenry', 'Hey, Jude' and 'Yesterday' by the Beatles and an old Irish song called 'She Moved Through the Fair'. I got full marks and that was enough for me to go on and pass the whole exam. But if I'm being totally honest here, I didn't really have any interest in music whatsoever at that point. It bored me and was a great time to grab a nap in class. For a while yet, my path was elsewhere, namely football. I was training constantly and getting pretty good. I was playing in better and better teams and people were starting to talk about me as a genuine prospect. My clubs in Dublin were doing well and I progressed enough to get picked for the Ireland Under-15 side, which was a big deal. One of the proudest moments of my life, even to this day, was standing for the Irish national anthem when we played the tournament hosts Portugal in an Under-18 European Championships. There were no Irish fans there and probably about 15,000 Portuguese. All I could think about was my mam and dad, how proud they'd be and how much they'd love to see this. I actually got emotional for the national anthem as we turned to face the Tricolor just like the senior team would do during the World Cup. That moment will never leave me. It was a special time in my football career. Once you are playing at that level, professional scouts start flying over to watch you and it wasn't long before I was offered a twoweek trial at Leeds United. My mam was keen for me to finish my studies, but Dad was like, 'Yes, but it's Leeds United!' He felt the same as me. Leeds was one of the top clubs in the UK at the time. Even though I'm a hardcore Man. United fan, this was what I'd dreamed about all my life. They really liked me at the trial and I was shocked and very, very excited to then be offered a two-year contract for Leeds United FC. I thought this was it, I was made! Any Irish kid who's a big soccer fan wants to get to England to play; the Irish leagues aren't as high profile or as well paid (although, playing in those leagues later, I found them to be amazingly tough and physical, an almost bruising experience). I'd already started dating a girl from school called Georgina, whose father was Bertie Ahern, the future Prime Minister of Ireland (he was Minister of Finance at the time), so it meant we'd have to conduct a long-distance relationship, which neither of us were very pleased about. We'd been to the same secondary school, Pobailscoil Neasain, and I'd admired her from afar for some time. I remember seeing her on the evening news on the steps of Dail Eireann on budget day with her dad and sister and telling my mam, 'That's the girl I'm going to marry.' I was 12 years old and Mam thought I was nuts. I'd even got my mate to speak to her about going out with me, but the answer came back, 'No.' It was like a dagger through the heart, it really was, I was gutted because I was really falling for this girl. That was about two years after I first saw her. I think we waited another year or two before we arranged to meet at a friend's party on 8 October 1994, the night before my sixteenth birthday - how many guys remember the first date?! - and we kissed and that was it, the love of my life. Initially, because I was only 16, I was on a YTS scheme at Leeds, getting Ј38.50 a week, but as soon as I turned 17 and signed as a professional, I was paid Ј200 a week for year one then Ј250 for year two and had free digs, so suddenly I felt rich. Having a bit of spare cash, I was starting to wear a few labels like Dolce & Gabbana, plus I'd got a Ј5,000 signing-on fee, so it felt amazing. But then the reality hit home. At first, we stayed in Roundhay in Leeds with a lovely couple called Pete and Maureen Gunby. He was a former Leeds coach. They were really nice to all the players staying with them. In year two, we were moved to lodgings in a purpose-built complex at the new training ground in Thorpe Arch near Weatherby. The digs were like army barracks. There was a strict curfew on nights out and anyone breaking that was disciplined. It was the closest thing to a prison. In the second year, they installed cameras in the corridors outside our rooms. As soon as the door slammed shut, the dream evaporated and you were in these pretty spartan digs, two lads per room. I had a family picture on my dresser and the Tricolor above my bed and a picture of Roy Keane on me wall, but that was as homely as it got. You went up for your food on a tray and sat down to eat in the canteen. They dished out proper bollockings if you did something wrong - shouting matches, the works. It was a real shock to the system and I got homesick very badly. That second year nearly broke me. I don't think I ever thought about actually walking - I never had the balls to go home and throw the towel in, that never crossed my mind, I probably should have but I was determined that it wasn't going to break me - but it did get me pretty down. One night us Irish lads went out and got pissed. The next morning we were frog-marched into the office and our contracts laid out on the table in front of us. They were sacking us. The coach in charge was shouting in our faces, but it turned out to be a scare tactic. As I wiped the spit from my face and looked around at the other lads, I realized it was working. It had started so well. Although I was only a junior, just a few months out of school, through a series of injuries to goalkeepers, more senior than me, I was named in the first team squad for a match at Southampton. It was incredible - I was on the first-team coach with all the professionals, big-name players I'd seen on the telly like Gary McAllister, Tony Yeboah, Gary Speed and the Irish legend Gary Kelly and now I was in the squad with them. I didn't play that day, but it was such a buzz to be even near that level of football. Mam and Dad kept all the paper clippings from back home and even recorded the news on Teletext, they were so proud. But the honeymoon period didn't last for long. The problem I had was that I flitted in and out of the team. When that happens, especially as a goalkeeper, football is a very lonely place. When you're not in the team at that level, often not even as a substitute, you're nothing more than a boot boy, a drinks boy, pushing skips around with kit in them, like. Sometimes players' faces fit and sometimes they don't. It's the same in any job, the same in boy bands ... One of the few highlights of my time at Leeds was the magic phone. One day, my room-mate Keith Espey went to ring his mum, but the payphone didn't seem to be working and he was pressing the number 7 in frustration - you know, 'Come on! Work!' Then the phone rang, he picked it up and it was his mum. 'Did you just try to call me?' she said. Turned out her phone had rung after all, but for some reason Keith hadn't had to put any money in. His mum checked on her next bill and there was no sign of the call being reverse charged or anything like that. So we all started doing it - pick up the phone, bang it back down, 7777, wait a few seconds, phone rings, make your call. I was phoning Ireland and we had Welsh lads phoning Wales. Even Harry Kewell, the future Liverpool player who was from Australia, was calling home. It was brilliant! This was one of the rare highlights, though, as I said. Mentally, those years at Leeds were the toughest time in my whole life. I didn't get on with the coach, I was only allowed six paid visits home a year, I was homesick and I wasn't getting picked. The rules were ludicrous - for example if I didn't shave, I was fined a fiver. There were times when I thought to myself, What am I serving my sentence for? When you are away you get very patriotic and I got very homesick and used to play a lot of Boyzone, funnily enough - 'Father and Son', tunes like that. Even more bizarrely, I saw Mikey from that band in a club one night in Howth, County Dublin, surrounded by girls, and that image stuck with me. By the Christmas of 1997 I knew I was finished with football. My height - 5ft 1oin - worked against me, as most modern professional goalkeepers are well over six foot. But also my face and personality weren't fitting in with certain people at Leeds United, as I said, and I could see the end was coming. Still, I was devastated. This had been my dream since I was knee-high and it was falling apart. Even the way they broke the news was typical - they said I was one of the best prospects they'd ever seen, but I needed to grow a few inches and that if I didn't between then and the end of my contract, it wouldn't be renewed. I was 19. It wasn't going to happen. Then, when the time came to leave, there wasn't even a handshake. My confidence was ruined as a footballer. I'm a very confident person - my mam and dad gave us a really good upbringing and filled us all with confidence - but after Leeds, that had gone, with regards to football at least. There were options: playing in the part-time Irish leagues (I eventually did play for Shelbourne, Cobh Ramblers and St Francis) or playing for English clubs further down the tables like Cambridge or Scarborough. I did try out for a couple, but I wasn't interested. My heart wasn't in it anymore. I retreated to Dublin, gutted. My football dream was over. To be honest with you, I was dying to get home.