WORLD CUP QUALIFYING INTERVIEW WITH KEVIN DOYLE:SCOUTING REPORT: Kevin Doyle.
Kevin Doyle is the unfinished article. He could mumble more and needs to drop the smiles. Smiles have no place in the modern game. Has got to take a look at his body language and up the workrate when it comes to conveying sullen hostility. His self-deprecation and use of sentences with more than one clause in them is a serious setback to his development.

Doyle needs to be more pouty and consistently petulant in the press area. He has to get an attitude and out it a bit more. As it is, journalists smile when they see him coming. Perhaps with serious application and training the good manners can be knocked out of him, Strengths: The hair colour is a start.

You are where you come from. Kevin Doyle’s story is a Wexford story, his personality the result of a Wexford upbringing. His accent pure strawberry picker. Tonight he wears the green against Bulgaria. On Wednesday his story intersects with the World Cup folklore of Italy. That’s part of his story too – Italy.

It begins, though, on the garden lawn in Adamstown. Padraig Doyle is Liverpool. There’s a gap of nearly four years to Kevin. He is Manchester United. They are the sons of GAA people. Dad a Wexford minor hurler; Mam a camogie player of note. But on the lawn day in and day out after school and through the holidays the boys are Liverpool and they are Manchester United.

Liverpool, the eldest, is the more enthusiastic. He drags Manchester United out there every day. The game is free form but adheres to one basic principle. Liverpool takes shots on Manchester United until Manchester United is absolutely fed up. This usually happens after about two hours of play. At this point lest Manchester United leave the field, it is permitted for Manchester United to take shots on Liverpool.

So it goes. Gaelic football flirts with them both and they flirt with Gaelic football growing up, but if you are a kid in Wexford it is a good time to fall head over heels for soccer. The first soccer which Kevin Doyle remembers seeing on TV is the World Cup finals. Italia ’90. The game was the heartbeat of the nation for a few crazy weeks.

The epic adventures of our tribe in Sardinia, Genoa and Roma. How could that mass lunacy not fill a boy’s head? Those crazy games, Mick McCarthy’s hectoring bark, Eamon Dunphy’s flying pen, Quinny’s toe poke home, Packie’s save, Davo’s penalty and finally Toto Schillaci wrapping our dreams up for us and politely handing them back to us that night in Rome. Italia ’90 subsided but was never erased from the nation’s DNA.

Kevin went down the local club playing soccer when he was about seven. Success wasn’t long about crooking its finger. The Kennedy Cup was and is the holy grail of the under-14 game in Ireland. He got picked by Jack Carthy from the age of 11 onwards for Wexford’s Kennedy Cup tilts. And then when the time came he was passed into the hands of Mick Wallace with whom he stayed till he left to join St Patrick’s.

Mick Wallace’s passion for the beautiful game is an infectious force of nature, a benignly shared love with Italianate flavourings. Wexford soccer draws its influences from Stadio Delle Alpi, Stadio Dall’ara, the San Siro and so on. “Mick looked after us very well.” recalls Doyle “He’d bring us away to different places. Apart from Ireland he brought me to Italy three times. He was very good to us. We went to a couple of tournaments in Italy and stuff. He was the the one that kept me interested in football when it would have been easier to forget about it and begin enjoying yourself in different ways.”

The trips were a rite of Easter and still are for Wallace who will bring another gang away on Thursday week to partake of the joys of Italian soccer, playing it and watching it.

“We’d play tournaments,” recalls Doyle fondly, “and Mick used bring us to matches. I saw Juve play, I saw AC Milan, Inter, Parma. Mick is Juve man; I had no real favourite but AC Milan were the team when I was real young.”

On his second trip to Italy he was one of three players spotted and coveted by Torino FC. Despite a primary devotion to Juventus, Wallace happily concedes that “from a political point of view Torino would be a lot more palatable than the Juventus thing. Torino socially is a more attractive club.”

Anyway, as a lover of all forms of Italian football and a man with an apartment in Turin, Wallace attends Torino games regularly as well. The club wanted the three Wexford lads to stay on in Turin after the Easter tournament. For Wallace the idea was naturally appealing but obviously he couldn’t leave the boys there so he promised to bring them back later in the year.

They returned for 10 weeks’ academy work in late summer missing a chunk of school but learning about technique and diet and the more holistic Italian approach to the game.

It was a culture shock but a welcome one. Living in accommodation at the academy and having their diet controlled by the requirements of Italian football meant adapting to fruit and vegetables and pasta and the introduction of a small amount of meat for the evening meal.

The other two lads were Damian Cullen, who still plays a bit for Ross Celtic, and Eric Bradley, the Wexford footballer. They came home and went on along with Darren Stamp and Eoin Quigley to form the basis of the first Wexford side to win the inter-league All-Ireland championship in 2000.

It was a golden time for Wexford soccer, a period when the game in the county began to find a true identity for itself, an identity which is probably the only truly sustainable model of professional or semi-professional football in this country, drawing local players in and operating a well-defined system on and off the field.

The GAA has always exerted a bit of a magnetic pull for soccer players in the county and Doyle was no exception. His father, Paddy, was a decent hurler with Adamstown and wore the purple and gold at minor and under-21 level before succumbing to the joys of breeding horses. His mother, Bernie, and his aunties, Kit Codd and Bridget Doyle, all played camogie for Wexford and each brought home All-Ireland medals in one grade or another.

When Kevin got to 16 or 17 in the time after Torino, he changed though. “I started taking soccer more seriously again. Football became something I played because they were asking me to go. I never hurled for some reason . . . My friends did. Me mother did. My dad did. Strange that I didn’t. Maybe because the school wasn’t a hurling school. Anyway from that time onwards I was more into the soccer again.”

So as his comrades drifted away back to Gaelic games he found himself foregoing college and heading to Dublin to play with St Pat’s under Pat Dolan. When Dolan moved to Cork he brought Doyle too. Since his mid-teens people had whispered in his ear about when would he go to England and where in England would he go and what to look out for when he got to England. He was four months shy of his 22nd birthday when he finally found his way to homely little Reading. It was the perfect move for a naturally shy man.

“Funny, there was no home sickness, mainly because of the age I was. Had I gone at 15 or 16 I wouldn’t have lasted. No way. When I left, though, my brother and his friends and my friends were all at an age where they would be over every weekend. My girlfriend moved over after six months . . . I’ve been very lucky to not have experienced that.

“For years and years with people going on to me about England as I grew up I got this idea in my head that England was some sort of football Holy Land. I just went to Reading, though, and I kept the head down. I didn’t really show much in the first couple of weeks. Just watched. It was interesting to know there was nothing majorly different. Nobody 20 times quicker than me or a 100 times better than me. They still ran and running is running. They did drills and drills are drills.”

In his first few weeks there, there were only 12 or 13 professionals training after a large clearout. Doyle was well settled in before the place began humming again with the signings of seven or eight new faces. He had the fortune to feel himself part of a small group who were there at the club when before a new leaf was turned. You’d have to push Kevin Doyle hard to find anything he might complain about.

Last year brought the grim business of getting relegated. “Awful time, but still an experience,” says Doyle now. “Good in a weird way to go through it, though. For new lads, if they want to win it will be good to have experienced it all . . .” He grins.

You wonder will he ever make it to the behaviour patterns of the top echelon of snarling stars. Those who date other slebs and drive fast cars and become involved in “nightclub incidents”. We’re safe! A man who met his partner at the National Ploughing Championships at 16 has a long way to go before he becomes the David Beckham of his generation. Off the field anyway.

On the sward it’s time to resume the Italian connection on Wednesday night. When you are 16 you don’t feel perhaps that your destiny is intricately tied in with 10 weeks of soccer in Turin. Mid-20s now. Back to Italy, to Bari. Kevin Doyle smiles. Shakes your hand. Off to write 20 new chapters.