In the glory days of Jack Charlton’s Ireland, Tony Cascarino was the lanky battering ram who invariably popped up to score a last-ditch winner. Those goals were all sorts of ungainly – often he looked more likely to fall over than do anything useful – and yet he had a knack for sticking the ball in the net when it mattered.
He was also among the most complex and tortured people ever to put on a green jersey – arguably second only to Roy Keane in the pantheon of Irish soccer stars who wore their existential woes on their green sleeves.
The story of Keane and his seismic falling out with Mick McCarthy on the eve of the 2002 World Cup is to receive the big-screen treatment in the new movie, Saipan. But before that, Cascarino’s unlikely emergence as an Irish sporting hero is told in Tony Cascarino: Extra Time (RTÉ One, Monday 9
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