Monday 19 December 2016 18:13, UK
In his latest column, Niall Quinn pays tribute to journalist Bob Cass and discusses the 'old-school' football writer as well as his own path into the media.
We buried the great Bob Cass in lovely Durham last week. Bob was an old-style football journalist who never took himself too seriously and his passing breaks another link with an almost forgotten era in the relationship between footballers and football writers.
If I talk to young players now about the way things used to be, they look at me as if they are seeing the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park for the first time. I say lads, this is a time very long ago, before evolution had allowed footballers to grow big earphones out of the sides of their heads and completely ignore the world around them.
It was a time when - if you played a decent game on a Saturday afternoon - the journalists wouldn't try to follow your four wheel drive with the blacked out windows through the players only car park. They'd follow you to the Tube and sometimes with very little encouragement, they'd get on with you and ride along for a few stops.
Somehow, by the time you got off at your stop, the Saturday evening pink edition of the Evening Standard would be on the news-stands and you'd be quoted.
You couldn't but love Bob. He could annoy you and wind you up but if you complained to him, he had that way about him that said you were just heaping another exasperation onto his life and that you should stop taking yourself so seriously.
I lost count of the times over the years that I had sociable drinks and a few laughs with Bob after games only to pick up the paper the next day and see that he had given me four out of 10 for my performance. I once said to him, "Bob what you know about football I could write on the back of a postage stamp." He grinned and said: "Aye Quinny, with a great big paint brush."
Players today won't believe you if you tell them that they are missing out on something as they live life in the cocoon. When I started playing back in the Victorian era, dealing with journalists was just one of those things that you learned to do as part of your job.
Once as a young lad, I mentioned to the renowned Daily Mirror journalist Tony Stenson in a conversation that I was becoming a bit fed up with life at Arsenal. The club had signed Alan Smith who was one of those freaks of nature who never got booked and never got injured, and I was beginning to feel that my career would be spent watching Alan from the sideline.
Tony nodded sympathetically while scribbling away. About a year later, Alan suffered a rare knock and I started a game, delighted to have got the chance at last, and I scored. A good day.
The next day the journalist from a year previously ran a big story about my disenchantment and disgust at how I was being treated at Arsenal. It killed me stone dead. George Graham hauled me into his office for a stern chat. It was a coming of age. I was sufficiently cheesed off to speak to Tony Stenson about it in much the same tones that George had spoken to me. That's how you grow up, and yet I still count Tony as an old friend.
The football journos were larger than life characters back in those days. There was Brian Woolnough who wasn't just larger than life but larger than me. Brian had someone in the Arsenal camp who has feeding him inside information from the dressing room.
It went on so long that it became fun. We used to go out every Tuesday, to a notorious drinking club at the time, and I remember we had a Hunt the Mole Day, seeing if we could expose the mole through the medium of alcohol. Brian would tease me years afterwards saying: "You'll never guess who my mole was." I never did find out.
As my career went on, I spent a lot of times with journalists. I was injured for the 1994 World Cup in America and went to the tournament with the media and spent a few weeks in press buses and press boxes. It was an education and though my heart ached to be playing, I had a lot of fun.
Not long afterwards, I started to write a regular article with the Guardian working as a Dublin papist alongside Belfast protestant Michael Walker. The Northern Ireland troubles were at their worst but the articles were less about football and more an aerial view of life in the North East. Michael was a tough task master but brilliantly versatile in understanding and heralding social issues.
Steve Tongue of the BBC once kindly tried to get me started in radio. Steve asked me to do a Wednesday night show for two weeks when I was out with a knee injury at Manchester City. To my horror, I got there and Steve said cheerily: "Ok you're on in 20 minutes."
Arsenal had won the Cup Winners Cup the day before and David Seaman had been invited along for me to talk to. I'm not sure if he was winding me up but Dave decided to answer all questions with one word. I had written about 20 questions to fill the three hour slot we had. I got through the 20 questions long before the first report from any of the matches came in and I wanted the ground to open up.
I was reading out results from the Scottish third division and I remember hearing Steve in my ear telling me to hand over to Roddy Forsyth at Kilmarnock. I had no idea at the time that Roddy was a journalist so I said: "There's a fella from Kilmarnock called Roddy wants to speak to us now." I hid for a week afterwards.
After my playing career finished sooner than I had expected, I wanted nothing to do with the game for six months, but just when I thought I was out they pulled me back in. It was the persistent nagging of Geoff Shreeves and Andy Melvin from Sky Sports that did the pulling.
I fobbed them off for a while until Geoff and Andy came over to Dublin to tempt me and because I am a man of principle, when they had bought me enough food, I agreed to go over for a game. On the day of the agreed game, I rang and told them some made up story about the airport being closed due to thick fog or something. I wasn't really ready for it.
When starting out on a media career as an ex-player and you walk into a press room in a stadium you've previously graced pitch side, people who pretended to hang onto your every word when you were playing now have little respect for you. In the press room, like on the football pitch, you had to pay your dues.
I'd met Bob Cass a couple of times when I played at Manchester City. He was a great friend of Alex Ferguson which made us all at City a bit suspicious of Bob. I got to know Bob a bit better on a couple of Ireland trips back in the days when players and journalists would all end up post-match in the same bar together till dawn. Bob was always fun and when I went back to Sunderland, he was massively helpful to me. He became a friend.
This afternoon we'll retire to the famous Shakespeare pub in Durham and we'll tell Bob Cass stories for hours and hours and still we will have forgotten more good yarns than we can remember. He was one of the those characters who gave me and all who knew him a richer view of life. Football doesn't make them like Bob Cass any more.
