The Rocky Road

For more than thirty years, no commentator on Irish sport, politics and culture has been the object of so much love, hatred and fascination as Eamon Dunphy. Now, for the first time, Dunphy tells the remarkable story of his own life.

Raised in poverty in Dublin, Dunphy was a good student who was never sure he could afford to finish school. The great passion of his life was football - and it was football that changed his life, when he got the call from Manchester United. Leaving his beloved parents in Dublin, Dunphy arrived in Manchester one day short of his fifteenth birthday - to join a club which included Bobby Charlton, Denis Law and soon George Best, playing under the watchful eye of Matt Busby.

The dream didn't quite come true, and when he saw that he was unlikely to break into the first team he requested a transfer. 'Nobody asks for a transfer from Manchester United,' Busby told him; but Dunphy wanted first-team football, and stuck to his guns. Thus began his career as a journeyman at the lower levels of the Football League.

Dunphy moved back to Dublin and, with his playing career was coming to an end, began work in journalism. His views on the politics of the time, his attacks on the sacred cows of what he dubbed Official Ireland, were bracing and often controversial. But for sheer intensity, nothing could match the firestorms generated by his commentary, in print and on television, about the Irish international soccer team. Dunphy's refusal to abandon his critical faculties when the Boys in Green took the pitch made him, for some considerable time, Public Enemy Number One in Ireland. His account of his absurd and sometimes terrifying experiences during that strange time is gripping and indelible.

These experiences made Dunphy a household name - and they almost broke him. In The Rocky Road - one of the most hotly anticipated Irish autobiographies of recent times - Dunphy bravely and brilliantly takes us behind the scenes of a passionate life.