James McClean: 'I'm a white Irishman, that’s not high on the agenda in England’

As we know from experience, a conversation with James McClean can only rarely, if ever, confine itself to what he calls “the finer things” in the game.

So when a few of us met up with him this week in Lansdowne Road, where he was attending the Aviva Soccer Sisters Dream Camp, while there was plenty of illuminating revelation about the more positive aspects of his relationship with football, it wasn’t too long before the discussion moved into much more troubled and troubling territory. To begin with, the mood could hardly have been more upbeat, McClean speaking about how his commitment to staying on top of his game meant that, when his season ended with Stoke City, he promptly took himself off to a training camp in Dubai before joining up with the Irish squad at their training camp in Portugal.