On a soft summer's night when Matt Holland's face is lined and his hair is grey he'll tell it all. At the end of the day when this time is long gone he'll sit down with Jacob and Sam, his two boys, and he'll spill the facts of his old life to them.

They'll be sitting outdoors, swatting the odd fly as the sun withdraws and the shadows lengthen and he'll begin to talk of what it was like, back in the day. The air will smell of grass and of horses and on the table between them, there'll be a decent bottle of red.

Yep. When they are old enough to ask and smart enough to know, well, he'll open that scrapbook of a mind and he'll take his time talking them through the tale. An unusual story. Dad was a footballer.

The boys will sit patient and smiling. They'll steal glances at each other because they know fragments already but really they want to know if their old man was a Prem dog.

They'll look in the spaces between the words for the hint of a tabloid moment which the old man is concealing. He doesn't look the part, not this quiet, sensible gentleman with the countryside in his heart, but he must have had his moments. Listen, listen.

He played in the latter day Gotham that was the Premiership. Surely he romped, surely he drank, surely he snorted coke from the bellybuttons of page three girls. He must have larged it somewhere. A sports car, an arrest, a bimbo. Must have.

They'll look in the crevices but the old man will remember best a moment that went down in the lowly suburb of Luz, just outside Lisbon on an October night when the century was young. Ah. How to describe it boys, that screaming blue streak of a goal, that blinding instant in the Stadium of Light. He's never known a better feeling.

When he draws down the story he'll struggle to explain the context, the unlikelihood of it all. He, Matt Holland being in the Stadium of Light, his team being Ireland and, well, Ireland being competitive in a group cut out for Holland and Portugal to scrap over. He'll explain that he was playing for a boss who was supposed to be history by then, that he was playing in a team with a hole in the centre of defence and playing Portugal, a team of sweet syncopation and brimming promise. Ever hear of Luis Figo, boys?

Looking for a preamble, the story will loop back perhaps to an afternoon in the ruined city of Skopje when he made his debut for Ireland. It was like this, see. Ireland 1 Macedonia 0. About five minutes left. Five minutes till qualification for the European Championships. Mark Kennedy starting to run a bit ragged on the left wing. The boss, the one who should have been history, put him in as a defensive manoeuvre. One-nil up, five minutes left. Away. What else are you gonna do?

Shore it up till the fat lady sings, he said.

Sure, said Matt Holland.

What a moment to get your first taste. If this didn't turn out to be an addictive thing, nothing would. What a time to savour. The chance to be on the grass when the long whistle blew and the hugs started. Subs, officials, management running in from the bench. He'd get a Macedonian jersey. Yes.

Of course Jacob and Sam know the next line. You know it too. Ninety-fourth minute. This Macedonian geezer, he's handed a free header from a corner. Knifes it home. And then it's over and the Macedonians are cackling. Under it all Matt Holland can hear the bottomless silence of his team-mates.

"I remember coming off and into the dressingroom. My head was everywhere. The excitement of making my debut, of being so close to it, to this moment, but everyone was so down. Just the silence in there and switching my thoughts from being happy at making my debut, at having got on, to realising that this was a really bad moment. Mick McCarthy came over and said to me that the goal wasn't my fault. I hadn't thought it was so that didn't make me feel better."

They'll hear all that and maybe they'll guess where it's leading. He'll tell about the time it took to settle into that Irish squad but then that goal in Lisbon and finally, he fills the three glasses, finally boys, the big chance. Playing in Dublin, alongside Roy Keane ("that's the same guy who manages Manchester United now boys". "We know dad") against the Dutch.

Matt Holland closes his eyes and shakes his head and his boys can't tell if he's about to laugh or cry. That Dutch game eh . . .

* * * ** * * * * * * * * *

Matt Holland could have been a banker. A lot of his dad lives in him and Mike Holland could have been a pro but chose security instead. Matt reckons his Dad has never regretted that decision for a moment and the mark of his own personality is that he knows he wouldn't have either.

"I would have made the same choice. My dad was 23, I'd arrived. It was Barrow that were offering him terms. He loved the game but he had responsibilities so he stuck with his career in the bank."

If there were regrets they were hidden deep in a happy house. The Hollands lived up north, in Bury and dad was a Bolton Wanderers fan, devoted at the time to Peter Reid. One day in 1979 he took his son to see Bolton play Southampton, hoping that the bug would catch the boy. From the age of three or four Matt had been coming to see his dad play, week in week out for Fishpool United, he was a good left back or a stand-in centre half if needed. It was time for the next step. Burnden Park.

Too late, too late, too late. Matt's peers had turned him. Every schoolboy in Lancashire had already lost his heart to Manchester United. Mike Holland was swimming against the tide. Matt would be a Manchester United fan. Bryan Robson would be his hero.

Mike had better luck with Ireland. "You'll play for Ireland someday," he'd tell his son, whose football dreams always ended at the top of the steps in Wembley with the FA Cup raised over his head. "You'll play for Ireland, where gran's from."

His gran came from Monaghan and lives today in Lytham and St Annes after a gently itinerant life working in golf clubs. She worked in catering, her husband looked after the bars and they moved every few years to a new club and a new start. It was always pleasant visiting them, playing snooker in the club, having a licence to run about the place. "You'll play for Ireland" they'd say. Hard for a kid in Bury to imagine but it was a seed.

He was a decent footballer from the start and looking back at all the hot housing he received it seems odd that his career took so long to blossom. The bank moved the Hollands down south to Herts when Matt was nine and not long afterwards he was invited to the Southampton Centre of Excellence, before that title became a contradiction in terms.

"I was there and then Arsenal gave me a trial. Steve Rowley, who is chief scout there now, took me to Arsenal and I was there for two or three years, then at 14, they decided I was too small, they decided not to offer me a deal to stay on. So I went and played locally for Lowton Boys and Frank Lampard Senior spotted me and said to come up and train with West Ham. So I played two or three games in the youth team at 15."

He had more doors shut in his face than a Jehovah's Witness with bad breath but somehow he never considered that he wasn't good enough. Rather he reflected on the quality of people who were rejecting him.

"Arsenal was and is a top club, you always think that just because you don't make it to the top there doesn't mean there isn't a place for you in the game."

And there was always the example of his dad. A job in the bank with parks football on a Sunday, it could have been a happy life anyway. He reached the grand old age of 20. He was totally, sublimely anonymous and facing a long queue for a place at West Ham.

"I spoke at length with dad. I knew I needed football. Bournemouth wanted somebody on loan. I went there and it became a permanent thing."

He arrived at one of the less auspicious times in Bournemouth's entirely inauspicious history. The club was broke. Following his old man to Fishpool United might have been more lucrative. Still Matt Holland loved it. He's not one of football's whingers.

"Yeah. Financially it was a big problem at Bournemouth. In the end the administrators were called in and I was the one to go. They sold me to Ipswich for £800,000 but before that we washed our own gear and the facilities were so bad, things were just bad everywhere."

"How bad?"

"Well coing back on the bus we'd get two pound at the service station to spend on food and drink for the day."

"What, they'd come through the bus and give you two pounds each?"

"No. They'd tell us that they were trusting us to go in and not to spend more than two pounds each. Then they'd pay the bill. We weren't getting paid wages for weeks on end. Finally the administrators came in, laid off half the staff and sold me."

His career somehow befits the patient personality of a bank manager's son. He persisted. Left fashionable clubs and worked his way down the ladder and back up. To Division Two, then Division One. Now the Premiership and international football and this year, European action.

Famously he has proved himself to be action-movie indestructible at Ipswich, an ever present dynamo in George Burley's sides to the extent that even at this point, the start of his fifth season they are certain he will end up breaking Mick Mills's record of 591 appearances for the club. He's touching 220 appearances on the trot and the last rest he can remember having is when he broke his arm at Bournemouth. He's played with badly damaged ribs and last year he remembers lining out against Sunderland three days after he turned his ankle but generally it's just knock and cuts and well, if there's a chance of getting on that field he wants to take it.

Best thing about the run is the horse. Out of the blue one day Lucy Wadham, a trainer and fan from Newmarket, got in touch and wondered if he'd mind if she called a racehorse after him. Actually the request came in the form of a letter from Lucy's little daughter. Matt got on the phone and said he'd be chuffed, delighted and honoured. He loves the horses. So Matt Holland went out and won his first ever race. And lo, he's been injured ever since.

Sometimes players find a club where their character rests easy and it becomes difficult to imagine them elsewhere. Ipswich is his sort of club. He's a Tractor Boy in his blood. On Saturdays his wife Paula brings the boys Jacob and Sam (they're seven and two respectively) to watch Dad playing football. And on Sundays (here's the footie bad boy bit) the family travel to watch mum compete at dressage and showjumping.

"She's successful at the dressage and showjumping which is nice," he says, oblivious to the damage he's doing to football's reputation, "so she supports me and I support her. We've got a horse box and take the two kids and there's a little kitchen attached to the horse box so we can have our lunch in there, it's a lovely day out."

They have one horse, are buying another and hope to get a pony for the children soon. There's not a floozie, a scandal or so much as an impure thought in his universe.

"I just love it at Ipswich. They've showed a lot of faith in me from the start. Even signing me, than making me captain two years ago."

At Ipswich they play an attractive brand of football driven by Holland's energy and Jim Magilton's passing. Holland's goal against Portugal was somewhat of a trademark effort. He likes to shoot and has 34 goals since coming to Ipswich. At Bournemouth he had 18 in his 104 games. It's a good total for a midfielder but the surprise with Holland is his deferential attitude to the game. He's still a student, still a traveller. He doesn't think anyone ever arrives at the top of their game with nothing left to learn.

"I'm always learning. Coaches at Ipswich instill that into everyone, no matter how good or how old you are, you are still learning. Mel Machin at Bournemouth was the same, there are things you add to your game and things you learn and get better at. I have people I look at. Look at Roy at this level, just training alongside Roy, such a world class player, you can only get better. I look at his passing and his running and I learn."

Which brings us to what you thought at the outset might be a sore point but which you know by now won't be. Holland's Irish career has been lived out thus far under the headline, 'poor man's Roy Keane'. Not his fault, just that his chances have tended to come when Keane is absent and when they do come he spends the build-up answering questions about Roy Keane, how good he is, how he'll be missed, etc. Even McCarthy's standard line on Holland runs Keanewise: "I've said before and I say it again, if Roy is out we won't miss him as much as we might because of Matt."

"Yeah," he says, "I've noticed that but it's natural. I've only been on the scene two or three years. He's Roy Keane. And most of the games I have been played in have come when Roy doesn't play. I get asked and compared but I tend not to worry about it."

And playing with Keane, playing right there beside him in the furnace blast of his intensity? "Well, he's vocal. It's great. He gees you up, he keeps you focused. He'll give me a rollicking from time to time. I expect that."

And you him? Any returned rollickings? "He doesn't often need one, to be fair."

Holland's own game is that of a natural midfielder. He can't remember a time when he didn't want to play there. With a dad who worshipped Peter Reid and with a lifelong infatuation with Bryan Robson himself, he was always going to develop as a roadrunner rather than a Wile E. Coyote but he finds that even now worship can teach him things. When he is short on faith in himself and low in spirits he still reaches for the good book.

"Yeah I've read Bryan Robson's biography about 25 times. If I need a bit of inspiration I'll read it. It's just the amount of injuries and adversity he had. Sometimes in this game you get down and you need a gee up. I'll often go back to that book. It's a good read and, as I say, it gets me inspired."

So here we are. End of this particular yarn. Matt Holland has set the scene. Ireland playing the Netherlands at home with a chance to put them out of the World Cup. Mick McCarthy of Barnsley pitching wits with Louis van Gaal, Emeritus Professor of Football. It is apt that Matt Holland should be in the heart of midfield for this one, playing Robin to Roy Keane's Batman. The one sector of the field which gives no worries.

"I watched both games recently. Ireland and Croatia. England and Holland. To be fair, Holland are decent." He laughs. "They ripped England apart but Lansdowne is different. Full house, we'll get at them from the very first whistle. We've a few world class players but the Irish set up is about the squad, working for each other. We'll work hard, the spirit in the side is fantastic. There's a feeling . . ."

And that's how it was boys. Backs to the wall, with only the team truly believing but still the noise in that old ground, the roar when Roy Keane tipped the game off. You'd have to have been there. And Matt Holland'll be lost in the once-upon-a-time of the Dutch story, building slowly to an ending lit by triumph or stained with tears.

Whatever, it was better than banking boys, better than banking.