Quinn is mightier than words

At first glance, the shortlist for the William Hill sports book of the year award (the winner is announced tomorrow) looks dreary: three sports autobiographies, a mix 'n' match of Joe Louis and Jesse Owens, and a diary of a football fan. Is that it? Plenty of words signifying very little.

Closer inspection (ie an actual reading) reveals that the list has more merit than one might have thought. Superficially, Niall Quinn - The Autobiography, complete with cover shot of the Big Number Nine staring battered and confused into the mid-distance, looks ripe for a Jiffy bag and a packing-off to the Irish nephews in time for Christmas. Think of Quinn and you think of a bloke who never quite made it at Arsenal, did all right at Manchester City, better than average at Sunderland and spent one hell of a lot of time on the Ireland bench. His story in his own words looked certain to be the worst of the quintet. It is possibly the best.

First, and not least, there is the fact that it is entitled The Autobiography rather than the ubiquitous and tautologous 'My Autobiography'. This selflessness runs through the book. It might have been titled 'Roy and I', 'Merse and I', or 'Booze and I', for throughout his career Quinn has been a team man. As useful off the field in engendering camaraderie (eg breaking Steve McMahon's nose) as he was on the pitch in providing flick-ons and knock-downs.

In this year's World Cup he faced his biggest challenge. As he admits: 'I am on this trip as much as a good-vibes man as a centre-forward. When things go bad I am to burst into a chorus of Always Look on the Bright Side of Life .' It may have been the choice of song, it may have been the way he sang it, but this tactic did little to improve Roy Keane's mood.

Quinn's relationship with Keane forms the guts of the book. The breakdown in Saipan being interwoven into the traditional 'I was born... I signed for Arsenal' tale. Thus it is that we move between this: '"Beware the Ides of March," said George [Graham] darkly as I left his office. It was 15 March. Only George would have had that to hand' and this: 'Finally, Mick [McCarthy] gets off a sentence. "Did you pick and choose your matches, Roy?"'

As a response, it's not exactly Oscar Wilde. Mick won't be embroidering it on pillows when he gets old. It's not going to make Roy shrivel and die. 'I don't do fucking friendlies,' he shrieks at Mick.'

Quinn admires Keane. 'You understand that not only is Roy very good, he's always very good.' He knows that Keane is the better player but 'if you offered to make me a deal, to give me all the skill he has and the life he has to lead, I'd decline.' They share an agent, Michael Kennedy, who remarkably charges Quinn nothing for his services. Kennedy and he try to broker a peace between 'possibly the two stubbornest people in the world'. They fail. And the failure rankles with Quinn as much as his failure to offer to take a penalty against Spain. His inability to keep the team together and then step forward when the team need him leads to an attack of the guilts that gives the lie to his happy-go-lucky persona. His regrets centre less on what he might have achieved for himself and more on how he might have helped others. It is entirely typical that he should have donated his testimonial money to charity and then become bashful when people made a fuss over it.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, he has made few long-term friends within the game. There are long drinking bouts with Tony Adams and Paul Merson ('Two stops later it's Hounslow - beautiful place to drink. It's about 11 am') but, Quinn departs for Manchester, 'I pushed on, lost touch, got mentioned in their therapy session.' He expects to keep in touch only with 'Stan [Staunton] probably, although I dread meeting him on my own - it's a day or two lost because we never seem to go home - Kevin Kilbane and Kevin Phillips I hope, and Peter Reid'.

Throughout his 19-year career he kept up the drinking. 'I drink to keep myself sane in what is a narrow, shallow world,' he writes. 'Very little in football is authentic. Hands up how many Premiership footballers travelled on public transport this year. How many of us had to queue for anything? We've quarantined ourselves from the world. The pub has been my escape.'

Arguably not the recommended bolt-hole for a professional athlete, but it worked for Quinn. And for a decade, with Jack Charlton leading the charge, it worked for the Irish team. They 'pretended to the world that we weren't to be taken seriously'; the teetotal Keane couldn't adopt such a pretence. If Keane was still drinking would Ireland have reached a World Cup final? Counter-intuitive, definitely, but possible.

Given the above, I would be more than happy to see Quinn walk off with the prize if it weren't for the quotes at the top of each chapter. These are well chosen - HL Mencken, Woody Allen, James Ellroy, Flann O'Brien, Paul Muldoon - but that's the problem. Either Quinn has accomplished a breadth of reading unparalleled in the modern game, or a ghostly presence is at work. I suspect the latter and the chief acknowledgement ('My thanks to Tom Humphries - a literary giant disguised as a sports reporter') supports the suspicion. Humphries is the most gifted sports writer working in Ireland, which is saying something, and his felicity of expression is evident on almost every page. This makes for a fine read but a ghost-written book has yet to win the prize and that strikes me as a trend worth maintaining.

If not Quinn, who? Tim Parks has breathed life into a bankrupt genre with his entertaining account of a season following Verona. The downside is that a success for Parks might encourage less talented writers to bore us with their fan's notes. (And then we only went and lost 2-0 to Port Vale et cetera et bloody cetera.) Atherton, maybe, but he was my first sporting hero who was younger than me - a worrying moment - and, therefore, I'm biased. Ellen MacArthur? Maybe not. All very admirable and all that, but I just don't get sailing. And the further someone sails, the less I understand it. Sorry, Ellen.

And so, by a process of elimination, we are left with Donald McRae's fascinating account of the friendship between Owens and Louis, which admirably combines sport and black American history. It would be a worthy winner. After all, Niall would probably only go and give the prize money to charity.