On Wednesday in a pub in downtown Chicago we inflated Big Cas into national legend. Keep watching the screen, we urged our American friend. He'll be coming in from stage left. Soon. No teeth. Big as a tree. Pace of a tree. Keep watching.

"Is it Tony Time yet," asked our friend.

"Soon, soon. Keep watching."

Big Tony Cascarino. He wouldn't claim to have been the best player ever to have worn an Irish jersey but he was one of the best guys ever to have worn one. Trips away won't be the same without him.

You knew he'd be a good guy before ever you met him. He was the exasperated comedy act in those wonderfully vivid columns which Andy Townsend used to write with Paul Kimmage a few years ago. Cas was the fall guy even in his own stories. He used to tell one about Kevin Moran ringing him up pretending to be a French radio journalist and inveigling Cas, new in France, into parlaying his three words of French into an interview.

We were in Belgrade exactly a year ago, standing near the elevators in the opulent lobby of the Hyatt. Three wretched hacks, stooped supplicants before the glittering millionaires of the Irish team. A quote sir, a smile? Anything you can afford, sir?

The boys were going training. The elevator doors would open every minute or so and out would step two or three of the surliest pusses ever to come into contact with easy money. We would nod affably, hitch our skirts above the garter level, say the word "howya" in a seductive way which didn't diminish our dignity.

They'd pass on wearily leaving us stoney stares for our troubles. We took to gambling on which of these guys we'd been travelling with for five years at least would acknowledge us. And in the end he arrived, the unanimous winner: Big Cas. He came shambling out of the lift, boots in his hand, teeth in his gob, grinning hugely and tumbling with self-deprecating stories of his life in France.

He was joint top scorer in the French league at the time with two Italians with whom he was claiming joint nationality. "It's the Italian connection innit boys? The Azzurri? You got it or you ain't." He was getting back to France on some sort of army plane after the match, the latest in a long list of the travel escapades which brought him back to Nancy after games.

He gave us five, 10 minutes of stories, got called to the team bus, said "Oops, best be off boys" and left us there, laughing in his wake as usual. Our personal hero.

Little wonder really that in games over the years when it came to be Tony Time some of us in the press box would clench our fists in excitement whenever the ball was in the vicinity of the big man. Go on Cas, go on my son.

I interviewed him once, after his performances in Iceland and Lithuania a few years ago had done so much to get us into the play-off stages. He was at home with his mother and stepfather in Kent and for some reason I booked a flight to Stansted instead of Gatwick and spent the morning in a panic, making bad decisions including getting an express bus to Heathrow and then negotiating London traffic in the back of a taxi as the interview time faded further and further into the past.

Every 20 minutes or so I would ring a totally baffled Cascarino with a progress report. His whole day was messed up but he was amused to the point where after a while I began to look forward to ringing him on the mobile with my newest estimated arrival time.

After a while the taxi driver realised who I was talking to and went into rapture behind the wheel. His big brother had played with Cas in the old days when Cas played for Crockenhill. Cas got transferred to Gillingham in exchange for a set of tracksuits.

Big Tone, as the taxi driver knew him, was the best player they'd ever seen down Crockenhill way and a posse of them had followed him on through his Gillingham and Millwall days.

Bloody smashing player, said the taxi driver, bloody smashing. I knew what he meant. Once in Windsor Park when the Irish team were warming up I watched Cas on his own mucking about with a ball at one end of the pitch. He could do enough little tricks and turns to get a Nike ad of his own. He just needed a little samba music.

People who didn't understand the speciality end of his profession often dismissed Cas as a donkey. When he went to Celtic he was affably naive about the wretched politics of Glasgow and socialised with old mates who were now playing for Rangers.

He was never forgiven and in the hostility his game suffered. At Chelsea, Glenn Hoddle screwed him over in a small mean ways. Being unhappy was never good for Tony Cascarino's game.

In France of all places, in the Velodrome at Marseilles and later in Nancy, they took to him, slimmed him down and added a handful of years to the end of his career and somehow Big Cas ended up being our most capped player, continuing to turn up long after his close pal Andy Townsend had decided that he'd had enough.

He wasn't the best player we've ever had. He knew it and the lovely thing about him was he'd never claim to have been. He was one of the rare ones who enjoyed the moments as they unfolded, he squeezed the best out of a career of unlikely length.

And unlike some of the superstars, he always arrived. From the Eoin Hand days through to the near misses of the last year or so, he was always there.

I remember the last time we lost a play-off, that night in Brussels two years ago when it all ended in tears and heavy rain. The team's grief that night was massive but it was Cascarino who came upstairs to the press-room afterwards, to articulate to people at home what it felt like.

The last we saw of him was on snatched satellite shots beamed to us in downtown Chicago. A boiling melee and Big Cas in the middle of it trading punches and somehow floating through it. Head and shoulders taller than his assailants. Tony Time. It made us sorry we wouldn't be around to tune into the self-deprecating yarn he would stitch together out of the incident later.

He'll be missed, the big man will be missed.