Collins’ time in management, meanwhile, was more successful than his playing career but similarly turbulent. The two younger ones were two friends on the road. One was stabbed and the other was killed by a car. It does wake you up a little bit, it makes you more alert and more aware of the difficulties of life and how you could end up being in situations like they were. So that would educate you to avoid those situations. Boxing is really tough,” he says. “And the rewards are very difficult to come by. But as regards football, the glamour, the crowds, the teammates, the camaraderie, I was just into that, you know? The fans were already losing faith, so I did what I did at Bangor and at Bohemians. I went to talk to them. The Carlisle United and Cumbria Independent Supporters Trust was a group of disgruntled fans who were boycotting home matches in protest at the way Michael Knighton and his family had run the club. Collins’ father Paschal had hoped he would pursue boxing like his younger brother Steve, a former super middleweight champion of the world.

Look, you know what Collins is like,’ Dermot told him. ‘He’s a f**king gangster.’ I was thinking, Yeah, I’m still here, Dermot, thanks a bleeding lot.

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I think a tough life is one that’s forced on you,” he says. “People were sent to work in England. My father was sent to work in England when he was 15, digging the roads and shovelling coal on a train, that was tough.

I was too young to follow his career as a football player, but it seems his progress was cursed with injuries and also his attitude at times didn’t help. Walking out of the Irish underage team because he wasn’t in the starting line-up for one of the matches shows petulance and years later, Johnny Giles told him that he was “full of himself”. It’s hard not to disagree with Giles’s comments. When reading about his playing career, one is left with the impression that he’s a misunderstood genius, but in reality, he was just a burly centre forward with a loudmouth and an over inflated ego about his ability as a player. The 2nd generation of The LMAB Rodfather Spinning Rod Series are here after a year of development time, with countless hours of testing on the water, repeated optimizations to the detail, along with a lot of hard work has gone into this 2nd generation of LMAB The Rodfather Spinning Rods range.

Again the putdowns are often hilarious; when John Courtenay got into a fist fight with a steward at the Carlisle ground, Collins comments, “Courtenay thought decorum was a deodorant by Lynx.” As a result, Collins’ body went into spasm, he lost consciousness and swallowed his tongue. A priest was giving him the Last Rites before he regained consciousness. I wasn’t laughing,’ he said. ‘I smiled – because no one has ever spoken to the lads like that. And it needed to be done.’