The real Macca

Paul McGrath's autobiography is a moving and often grim story which leaves you feeling a kind of awe that he had a career at all, never mind become one of Ireland's greatest football players, says Ken Early

Back from the brink. By Paul McGrath. Published by Century. Hardback €19.99

There are several kinds of footballer's autobiography. There is the traditional post-tournament money-spinner, in which the publishers end up regretting the huge advance they paid to a famous footballer in exchange for a collection of boring anecdotes that reveal nothing about anything. Recent releases by Wayne Rooney, Frank Lampard and Pele fall into this category. A typical revelation from Rooney's book was that he likes wearing slippers because they are so comfortable and sometimes he even drives to training in his slippers.

Then there is the controversial, pull-no-punches diatribe in which the player attacks all the mediocrities and Lilliputians who have tried to stand in his way over the years. Diego Maradona, Roy Keane and Robbie Fowler are some of the more recent contributors to this entertaining genre, which tends to sell rather better than the first.

Then there is the warts-and-all confessional, in which a troubled player – usually accompanied by one of the more talented ghostwriters – gives a graphic account of his struggles with personal demons. Some notable examples are Tony Adams (drink), Stan Collymore (sex addiction, depression) and Paul Gascoigne (too many to mention). But Paul McGrath's Back From The Brink is probably the first footballer's autobiography where you eventually lose count of the suicide attempts.

Only now is it becoming apparent how little we knew about the most popular footballer ever to play for Ireland. Everyone who followed the game knew McGrath had a hard upbringing and that he was an alcoholic whose drinking had destroyed two marriages and made it hard for him to hold down a career after his retirement from football. But few could have appreciated the full extent of his misery.

The early part of the book covers McGrath's childhood in various institutions on Dublin's southside. A chapter written by his mother, Betty, details how she was left pregnant after a brief relationship with McGrath's father, a Nigerian medical student. Scared to tell her parents what had happened, she moved to London and gave the baby up for foster care with the Catholic Crusade.

In one harrowing passage, McGrath describes how he came out of foster care at the age of five and moved back to live with his mother for a couple of weeks. He was delighted. "To me, my days in care were now over. Betty had come to find me. We were clearly mother and son." Then one day he was told he was going to visit his friend Ernest. "I was excited on the way to Dun Laoghaire. There were sweets and crisps in the car." They entered a big building and little Paul walked around looking at children "staring coldly back at me". Struck by a "kind of sixth sense", he turned to say something to his mother, but she was gone. He remained in care until the age of 18.

McGrath's mother began to visit him again after a couple of years, often bringing his younger half-sister Okune, who suffered from a serious blood disorder. McGrath got on well with his mother at that stage, but he still wondered why Okune could live with her while he had to live in an orphanage.

He was publicly beaten most mornings for wetting his bed. He bullied and was bullied. Every so often, a member of staff would remind him: "You are only here because nobody else wants you."

"I withdrew into myself," he says, and throughout his life withdrawal, often to the oblivion of drunken insensibility, was his default response to crisis.

By the time he left care, he was an impressive athlete and footballer, playing with Dalkey United, but within months he suffered a catastrophic mental breakdown that lasted about a year. As he lay in John of God's in a trance-like state, unspeaking, incontinent and covered in bedsores, doctors told his mother he might never walk again. Three years later, he was playing for Manchester United and blossoming into full-blown alcoholism with Norman Whiteside – perhaps his best friend in football – and Bryan Robson.

McGrath got on well with his first boss at United, Ron Atkinson – "one of my favourite men in football" – who signed him from St Pat's on the recommendation of Matt Busby. Atkinson was "a great man-manager" but he did not realise the extent of McGrath's problem with drink.

Alex Ferguson had a better idea, but while McGrath insists he had no personal problem with Ferguson, the Scot's "cold, autocratic" style rubbed him up the wrong way. "I've always had an aversion to people barking at me, trying to put me in my box.. this thing of being talked down to. This invisible armour comes down... I just think... you can try, but you're not going to dominate me."

Ferguson says, "I wasn't reaching him... If I could have got him to lose his temper, I probably would have got more out of him. But he wouldn't lose his temper." You are reminded of George Best, who would count the animals on the wallpaper behind Matt Busby as he was lectured.

Ferguson says that if he were faced with the same problem today, he would handle it differently, that his impatience with McGrath showed his lack of experience. But at the time he couldn't afford to wait around for McGrath to get better, so he sold him to Aston Villa.

It was there that McGrath met Graham Taylor, who he recalls with great fondness. Taylor realised to his horror that he had signed an alcoholic after McGrath played a game against QPR drunk. His response saved McGrath's career. Instead of bawling him out, he tried patiently to help him and McGrath gratefully opened up. "The thing that struck me was that he was interested in me." McGrath repaid Taylor with the best football of his career.

He was Villa's player of the year in four of his eight seasons there and was voted PFA Player of the Year in 1993, making him one of only five defenders to win the award in its 33-year history. The benders continued but he performed consistently well until his 1997 retirement. At that point, his life again began to fall apart and McGrath is not afraid to let us know just how low low can go.

Back From The Brink is a moving and often grim story which leaves you feeling a kind of awe that McGrath was able to have a career at all, never mind become one of the four greatest Irish players alongside Giles, Brady and Keane. Ghostwriter Vincent Hogan has done a superb job with this compelling material. His innovation of interspersing McGrath's own accounts with interviews with the people in his life reinforces the credibility of the narrative. Of all the football books currently cluttering the market, McGrath's and Hogan's is by far the best.