Laptop Dancing and the Nanny Goat Mambo: A Sports Writer's Year [Paperback]

First of all, I'm not a HUGE sports fan, with only a passing interest in Premiership football, golf etc. The fact that this is so absorbing is down to the quality of Tom Humphries deft talent.
Although golf, the Winter Olympics and more are covered, the meat of the book is the author's various adventures at the World Cup 2002 in Japan & Korea, and the fall-out from his interview with Roy Keane that started a chain of events that culminated in Keane's sensational departure from the Irish team & worldwide headlines.
Humphries' descriptions of his own tumultuous relationship with the formidable Keane are so laugh-out-loud-funny that I ended up embarrassing myself with suppressed laughter on my daily train journey.
But this book is about much more than the Roy Keane fiasco. Humphries is referred to in the blurb as the 'Bill Bryson of sports journalism'. Well he's that, and much more besides...

I picked this up in Shannon airport, where the image of a kareoke goat on the front cover got my attention. Only when I began reading the book did I realise that this was going to be an Irish book. Thankfully the beginning devotes itself to self depracation and Winter Olympics, so it became obvious that only small passages of the book would mean nothing to me. But this didn't matter, as the style is so endearing "Rang home tonight, turns out its my birthday today".
It seems that Humphries, having spent so long always being in the wrong place at the wrong time, found himself in the right place to be writing a journal. One suspects that this book wouldn't be as successful without the Keane saga but, not being Irish, I haven't felt that the book led up to it at all.

Tom Humphries is a sports journalist, who works for The Irish Times. He was born in London, but grew up in Dublin. "Laptop Dancing and the Nanny Goat Mambo" is his second book, and it follows his working life in 2002. Knowing the year's sporting calender, he'd have had some idea how busy things were going to be for him - but he wouldn't have expected things to have worked out just as they did...

As it turns out, it was the Irish soccer team's involvement in the World Cup that dominated the year. Well, maybe not exactly...the Saipan Incident, and its fallout, came to dominate Ireland's sporting year - and Humphries himself can claim the credit for that ! Ireland's team captain leading up to the finals was Roy Keane, considered by many to be the country's greatest ever player. While soccer is a team sport, Ireland simply wouldn't have been capable of qualifying for the Finals without him. The events that led up to the World Cup Finals that year, however, clearly left him feeling disillusioned with the international set-up. The FAI (the organisation in charge of Irish soccer) and Mick McCarthy (the team's manager) had decided that Saipan - an island in the Pacific - would be used as the pre-tournament base. After all, it had a very nice hotel - and the lack of a football pitch on the island at the time of the visit mustn't have been noticed. Unfortunately, when the team arrived, they discovered the FAI had forgotten to pack the soccer balls or training gear - which, obviously, made training a little difficult. Furthermore, Keane, as captain, wasn't too impressed with the attitude of some of his team-mates. (For example, while allegedly preparing for the Finals, the rest of the squad had spent an entire night drinking with the Irish journalists in a nearby English pub). Furthermore, when the training equipment finally arrived, he was unhappy that some were allowed to skip the scheduled training sessions.

Keane gave two interviews in Saipan - one was with Humphries, and it was this that sparked the 'Saipan Incident'. While there was nothing in the interview with Humphries that should have come as any great surprise - or caused any great bother - McCarthy called a team meeting, kicked off an argument with Keane and then sent his team captain home. The buildup to and the fallout from the incident makes for compulsive reading - and, bluntly, McCarthy comes off badly from start to finish. Humphries felt McCarthy was too paranoid about speaking to the media - something, he suspected, may have dated back to McCarthy's playing career. (McCarthy had been described at one point as being "slower than a wet week in Barnsley." He was subsequently challenged by a journalist to a race...and lost it). However, where McCarthy seemed to spend his time running away from Irish journalists, he seemed happy enough to go running after English journalists. (Interestingly, the other interview Keane gave also caused a little bother. Paul Kimmage - who, along with David Walsh, Humphries acknowledges as Ireland's finest sporting journalist - was sent by the Sunday Independent to cover the World Cup. Kimmage interviewed Keane on the same day as Humphries - however, his paper twisted how Kimmage's writing to make it appear that Keane's marraige wasn't all it might be. Kimmage was furious, and refused to write another word for the newspaper until the paper apologised. Kimmage subsequenly decamped to the Sunday Times because of what happened - where he has since won several awards. Kimmage's own book, "Rough Ride", isn also well worth reading - an ex-cycling pro, it looks back over his own sporting career and deals explicitly with that sport's drugs problem).

While it's soccer that dominates, there are other events covered - the Winter Olympics (which had its own controversies), the World Cross-Country Championships, the New York Marathon, Armagh's charge to All-Ireland glory and the Ryder Cup all contribute to Humphries' sporting year. Our author has a great deal of time for Padraig Harrington and Sonia O'Sullivan - both on a personal level and as athletes. However, he knows he can't always write positively about them, and - as the book closes - he finds himself worrying that his articles may have damaged the relationships he had enjoyed with them. Still, there's nothing nasty, malicious or bitter about his writing - it's funny, easily read, affectionate and, in many cases, the admiration for who he's writing about is clear.