The Walls by James McClean: An improbably terrific book from a genuinely fascinating figure

The Walls

Author: James McClean

ISBN-13: 978-1844887101

Publisher: Sandycove

Guideline Price: £22; 368pp

There’s a pattern to James McClean’s interactions with various figures throughout his autobiography. He’s buzzing when he hears his former Derry manager Stephen Kenny is to be the new Ireland boss. He likes Michael O’Neill when he gets the Stoke job. He plays alongside John O’Shea for Sunderland and Ireland, has him as club captain and later on, during a stint as a TV pundit, even calls for O’Shea to get the Ireland job full-time.

He falls out with them all eventually – but that’s not the pattern. If the book was just a litany of bust-ups and score-settling from the dressingrooms populated by McClean over the past two decades, it would lose its momentum very quickly.

No, the pattern, repeated throughout The Walls, is that when it goes bad, it goes very bad. And while McClean himself marches onwards without regrets or a backward glance, his wife Erin and/or his friend and agent Graham Barrett come in to provide context, explanation or, frequently, just general head-shaking at another relationship torpedoed.

“I do believe that John [O’Shea] very much respects and cares about James,” says Barrett towards the end of the book. “He would have always called to give me a heads-up when James needed an arm around the shoulder or a kick up the arse, and he very much looked after him. So I find it difficult that James has a very different view of John than I do now.”

In so many ways, Erin McClean and Graham Barrett are the heroes of the book. James McClean makes no attempt here to hide what a difficult character he can be. He is obsessive and impulsive, he has no filter, he pays no real heed to consequences. Without his wife and agent, he would get into so much more trouble than he already does. Not for nothing is the WhatsApp group between the three of them eventually named: Erin And Graham Are Always Right.

Including interviews with Erin and Graham is a masterstroke by Daniel McDonnell, McClean’s collaborator here. The soccer writer with the Irish Independent is so much more than a ghostwriter, weaving an often chaotic narrative together to give a rounded portrait of a unique individual. This is not your regular sports autobiography.

The James McClean who emerges from it is a genuinely fascinating figure. To put it mildly, he is a man of contrasts. Someone who cares so deeply what people think about him that he spends hours searching for his name on social media. At the same time, someone who cares so little for the fallout from his many rows and face-offs that he thinks nothing of going nuclear on almost anyone, regardless of the previous relationship.

He loves Derry, he hates Derry. He is part of the furniture at Sunderland, he can’t get away from there quick enough. Even Wrexham, the Netflix-filmed glorious coda to his career, eventually sours – not because they don’t want him or have fallen out with him, mostly because he can’t accept only being a bit-part member of the squad as a player in his late 30s with a bad hip.

His lust for battle feels indefatigable at times. McClean would doubtless say his upbringing in Creggan in Derry left him with little choice in the matter but it doesn’t take long to realise his is a particular brand of fury all his own. Plenty of footballers grow in tough circumstances without feeling the need to track down someone who calls them a bad name online.

For all that, McClean’s stance around the poppy wars in the UK was admirable at the time and is rendered all the more so in this telling. The grinding predictability of each November, the justified paranoia around his own and his family’s security, even just the extent to which it cost him transfers and contracts over the years is jaw-dropping, regardless of whether or not you followed it at the time.

The pace of the book is relentless. Not for McClean the usual football-book rhythm of games and finals and seasons. The football is secondary, as it should be in any half-interesting autobiography. The sections dealing with his money – both his weakness for spending it and the constant demands on it from back home in Derry – are deeply unsettling. If it’s possible to feel sorry for a wealthy footballer as he works through first-world problems, you’ll feel it here.

Ultimately, there’s no particular happy ending. The book concludes with his move back to Derry – himself, Erin and their four kids going back to where it all began – and yet even as the last words are written, you can feel their foreboding (borne out by subsequent events, as McClean has fallen out spectacularly with the club since the book went to print).

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Nothing comes easy in the life of James McClean. It’s a testament to him, his wife, his agent and his co-writer that they’ve produced such a terrific book out of all the madness.