Even before the news of Robbie Keane's transfer to Inter Milan for £16 million - an incredible 1.5 squillion lira - I had been considering retirement from football.
Like many ageing players, I've been feeling the pace of the game of late. More ominously, I've been noticing the increasing toll of injuries among my contemporaries: broken fingers, sprained ankles, hip replacements, the list goes on.
Equally important in the fantasy world we non-professional footballers inhabit is the dwindling number of role-models from the professional sector: those vitally important people who get paid to play and also happen to be older than you. The retirement of Tony Cascarino was a particularly hard blow, removing as it did a player who reassuringly combined advanced age with what might be termed limited ability.
There is always, or at least there used to be, Sir Stanley Matthews, who played well past his 50th birthday. A peerless dribbler, he was famously no good at anything else: he rarely scored, hated heading the ball and never won a tackle in his life - qualities many of us can readily identify with. Unfortunately, some of us don't dribble either (except a little when we're short of air), and Sir Stanley played too long ago to be really useful.
By the time you read this, Robbie Keane may have made his debut in an otherwise meaningless pre-season friendly; but I learnt of his impending move just before my Friday-night game last week. I was doing the normal warm-up routine, which involves trying to tie my football boots while simultaneously wearing them, when I heard he had flown to Italy to discuss personal terms and I nearly pulled a hamstring.
My fellow players were agog at the news. And after a typically bad-tempered match, which involved the exchange of some highly personal terms, we stood around discussing the move; hoping "our boy" would do well in the hardest league of all; remembering gravely all those who had tried and failed before him.
But on the way home, inevitably, I found myself looking back at my own career in football - a career which had peaked by the time Robbie Keane was five. Back then, I played in Dublin's Athletic Union League, Division 3D (Sunday); and although this will mean little to most readers, a few aficionados may be raising their eyebrows at the reference and wondering: was he really that good?
No, he wasn't. Division 3D (Sunday) was the weakest in the league, and we were the worst team in it. Up in the stratosphere of the first division, the AUL was a well-respected institution; by comparison, we were pond scum, content only in the knowledge that from simple organisms such as us, higher football life forms could one day evolve. And while I made most of my appearances for the team at full-back or outside right, on the mornings where 11 other players turned up I was usually the linesman.
Being linesman was the most humiliating job in football. At that level, the only official was the referee; and linesmen would be appointed from among the supporters (in the highly unlikely event that there were any) or superfluous playing personnel. Not that it made any difference, because the referee worked on the assumption that you were
biased and ignored all your decisions anyway. He'd consult the sideline itself before he'd ask you.
In the early days, our team was sponsored by a confectionary warehouse and we all, memorably, received a consignment of Mars bars when we signed up. That first season we even had a squad, and we based our game on a concept known as "training," which resulted in mid-table respectability. But the usual distractions of twentysomething life - the women, the drink, the endless Mars bars - took their toll, and discipline collapsed like a cheap deckchair.
We quickly lost the taste for travelling into tough parts of Dublin on winter Sunday mornings and facing players who were - in a very real sense - hungrier than us, and were intent on honouring the Holy Day by beating the bejaysus out of us.
There came a time when the opposition's score was more likely to reach double figures than the number of players turning up for us. One day, only eight of us made it (the manager assured me of a first-team place), and our best player walked off in disgust. He had a much lower embarrassment threshold than the rest of us; but even we knew it was all over.
The great thing about football, however, is that provided you have the ability to lie to yourself constantly, your embarrassment threshold rises in inverse proportion with the decline in your physical ability. So for a decade and a half I've continued to enjoy the game on a purely voluntary basis, ignoring things such as the fact that I haven't scored during the lifetime of the present Government and just concentrating on the sheer fun of it: the bursting lungs, the oxygen-deficit nausea, the inability to get out of bed the following morning without lifting equipment.
But the Robbie Keane transfer finally brought me to my senses. It was sobering enough that a 20-year-old could be worth £316 million; but sitting at the breakfast table on Wednesday morning and reading about his appallingly mature performance at the press conference in Milan was enough to convince me it was time to come to terms with retirement.
Unfortunately, retirement's terms proved totally unrealistic, and my imaginary agent and I had no choice but to walk away from the table. So, unless we've been made a much better offer in the meantime, I will have put my ageing body through hell yet again last night. And if so, it'll be the mercy of God if I'm not now injured; because unlike life with Inter Milan, there are no meaningless friendlies at this level.
Frank McNally is at fmcnally@irishtimes.ie
