“Who’s your next victim?” Liam Brady asked director Seán Casey after they completed The Irishman Abroad, the wonderful documentary on Brady’s career. While victim number two has plenty in common with the Dubliner – a former Republic of Ireland international who also enjoyed an enriching spell playing in continental Europe – their stories are world’s apart too.
The only doubt there ever was about Brady’s potential to make it in the professional game was that he was too small. Tony Cascarino’s doubters suspected his sole asset was his height. Famously, when Gillingham signed him from non-league Crockenhill, the fee was a set of tracksuits. “Some people said they overpaid,” Cascarino chuckles.
And while Brady might have suffered his own lows along the way, they paled next to the ones Cascarino experienced on and off the pitch, much of the turmoil in his personal life, by his own admission, self-inflicted.
It’s almost 25 years years since Full Time: the Secret Life of Tony Cascarino, written with Paul Kimmage, was first published, and just like the book, Casey’s documentary shows us a side to him that’s firmly at odds with the caricature. As Kimmage himself suggests, the notion was always that Cascarino was a Jack-the-lad who wasn’t the sharpest tool in the shed. When he worked with him, he discovered a “very sensitive, very, very bright” man.
RM Block
And he comes over that way, too, as he reflects on his life, particularly the spells when he hurt those closest to him by, well, succumbing to temptations. “I was infected with the disease of me,” he says, describing the world he lived in as a “shallow” one.
There was no more turbulent time than when he lived “a double life” while in France. It was the most successful spell of his footballing career, but his private life was in chaos, Cascarino having a child with the woman who later became his second wife when he was still married to his first. He finally ended his first marriage with a note, rather than talking to his wife, an act of “cruelty”, as Kimmage describes it.
The documentary doesn’t delve too deeply into one of the bleaker episodes in his life, when he was arrested after his second wife accused him of assault and threatening to kill her, accusations he always denied. The charges were dropped six weeks later but, inevitably, that was the end of marriage number two.
Cascarino, now 63, believes he has become “a better person” since then, a better father too to his six children and the one he adopted, the daughter of his current wife Jo. “I’m in a great place at the moment, very happy,” he says, “until something goes wrong and I’m a naughty boy again”.
There is no end of laughs through the documentary, particularly when he meets up with his old mucker Andy Townsend, the pair having known each other since they were 11 and playing schoolboy football in Kent.
Townsend recalls Cascarino’s ashen face after he took his penalty against Romania at Italia 90. It went in, but the divot is probably still airborne. “You went, ‘F**king groundsman, it’ll take him a year to fill that hole’,” says Townsend, and the pair dissolve. Not that Cascarino ever wanted to take that penalty. Ray Houghton asked him if he was ‘a man or a mouse?’ “I said, ‘Pass the cheese’.”
And with no little laughter, he recalls Jack Charlton’s tribute to him when he invited Cascarino to play for Ireland – “I saw you at Gillingham, I thought you were s**t” – his international spell among the happiest of his career.
After its conclusion, there was, of course, a doubt over whether he was ever eligible to play for Ireland, Cascarino and his sister Amanda talking about the time their mother discovered that she was not, in fact, the daughter of Mayo man Michael O’Malley.
No end of complications along the way, then, as there were through his club career, but it finished on a high in France where he enjoyed sparkling spells with Marseille and Nancy. Mystery injections, hints of bribed goalkeepers, more than 100 goals in less than 200 appearances, there was never a dull moment.
For a fellah who began to think as a teenager that he had more of a future in hairdressing than he had in football, it was some ending to his career. He was awarded the freedom of Nancy for his achievements there. “The only other sportsman at that stage to have received the honour was Michel Platini,” he laughs. Cascarino was, after all, worth more than a set of tracksuits.
– Tony Cascarino: Extra Time, RTÉ1, Monday, October 6th, 9.35pm
