Liam Mackey

THERE are interviews with footballers which you could pretty much script in advance: the non-committal one liners, the repetition of old answers, the avoidance of anything remotely contentious, the strict adherence to the party line and, of course, the inevitable smattering of deadening cliches – obviously, to be fair, we'd have taken that before kick off, we're just taking it one game at a time.

And then there are interviews with Stephen Hunt.

The Ireland and Reading winger is a godsend for hard-pressed hacks – candid, funny and far more reflective than his image as a court jester would suggest.

So this morning, along with a few colleagues, I was only too happy to answer the call when Hunt was presented to the press in central Dublin. No matter that it was all in the name of promotion for a well known chocolate bar – Hunt isn't going to try to flog you anything just because there's a mic under his nose.

And so it proved, as he opened up on Stephen Ireland, uncertain times at Reading, his late emergence as a first choice international and life behind the scenes with Trap, Marco and Liam. For sure, there were chuckles along the way too – Trapattoni hasn't nominated him as the joker in the Irish camp for nothing – but when it comes to insightful, unvarnished truth-telling, the man they call Hunty is a welcome antidote to the prevailing climate of vacuous celebrity bullshit.

Read all about it, as they say, in tomorrow's Examiner.