Hail the angel of Sunderland

STADIUM ALIGHT was the irresistible if somewhat excitable front page headline on the Sunderland Echo last Wednesday.

The story beneath reported how firefighters had prevented “a devastating blaze” at the Stadium Of Light but not before the early morning fire had destroyed the club’s directors’ suite.

Once Black Cats fans had come to terms with the news, probably the only surprise to them was that it required the efforts of the emergency services to save their ground.

Much more likely, they would have thought, that their chairman would have dealt with the conflagration all by himself. It’s easy to picture the scene: the big, strapping fella with the Dublin accent suddenly materialises and, instructing everyone else to stand well back, dives into the heart of the inferno and proceeds to douse the flames with nothing more than a bucket of water and a pair of his celebrated disco pants.

Then, blackened but only slightly dishevelled, he re-emerges from the dense smoke and, shyly waving away all plaudits and offers of assistance, tells the adoring crowd: “My work here is done for the morning. Others need me now.” And then pausing only to quickly perform the official opening of a nearby hospital or two, he stretches out his arms and soars into the air above the river Wear, as the weeping hordes below exclaim as one: “Is it a bird? Is in a plane? No, it’s Superquinn.”

Ok, so maybe hyperbole isn’t the exclusive domain of the Sunderland Echo, after all. But in the eternal battle between the forces of light and dark, even when it’s only in the context of football, it’s fair to say that Niall Quinn is one of the good guys.

Not that the best of intentions necessarily guarantee universal approval. Au contraire, when Quinn found himself between a rock and hard place in Saipan, his efforts to broker a truce between Roy Keane and Mick McCarthy earned him the wrath of more than just Keano, who famously branded him “a muppet” and “a coward”.

Happily, as we all know, that sorry episode has since been put to bed by all three of the main protagonists but, in certain quarters, residual cynicism about Quinn’s motives persists.

With positions hardened by the civil war which blew up around Saipan, there were some in the media who saw base politicking in the player’s attempts at peace-making. “He’s just positioning for a gig with the FAI,” was a common enough refrain at the time.

That’s not how it seemed to me. At that unforgettable press conference in Izumo, I thought that Quinn was genuinely on the verge of tears as he attempted to make sense of the seismic events which had unfolded in the Irish camp.

And, before a week had passed, it was recognisably the same emotional man who was to be found almost levitating with joy in the mixed zone after that memorable draw with Germany in Ibaraki, the game in which his own appearance off the bench had helped create Robbie Keane’s celebrated late, late goal.

Whether the news was good or bad, I recall writing at the time that, as a journalist, the man in the Irish camp you always wanted to seek out was Quinn: what you invariably got was thoughtful, articulate and from the heart.

The impression of a fundamentally decent human being was underlined by Quinn’s decision to donate the proceeds of his 2002 testimonial game to hospitals in Sunderland and Dublin. And, even as late as this week, the same issue of the Sunderland Echo which broke the news about the fire at the Stadium of Light, had a story on its inside pages reporting that the Sunderland chairman was lending the club’s weight to a campaign to find a bone-marrow donor for a local seven year old girl.

This is all admirable stuff but, for those so inclined, it means Niall Quinn can all too easily be lampooned as football’s Mother Teresa. Well, correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t recall that herself ever devoted too much of her spare time to the pints and the horses, not to mention the wearing of fetching disco pants.

Speaking of which, Quinn’s action in arranging for stranded Sunderland fans to be ferried all the way home from Bristol Airport in a fleet of cabs earlier this season, has seen the lyrics of the celebrated Man City/Sunderland anthem updated in tribute. The new song goes: “Niall Quinn’s taxi cabs are the best/So shove it up your arse Easyjet/Fat Fred wouldn’t do it for the Mags/Niall Quinn’s disco pants.”

Not quite ‘Ave Maria’, no. Still, beloved amongst football chairmen and so thoroughly worshipped on Wearside as he is, it’s surely only a matter of time before a red and white sabotage squad tears down that massive steel sculpture in Gateshead and replaces it with the likeness of the man they call Quinny.

The new angel of the north? Not sufficiently pious, perhaps, but certainly tall enough.