James McClean: ‘Wearing the poppy was just never going to happen’

I’m very opinionated and I hate all things British. That’s from people who don’t know me. The reality is quite the opposite.

I go training, go home and switch off. A lot of my days are quite bland, quite basic.” McClean sounds as sane as he looks gaunt on a bleak Monday in Derry. He spent 14 years in English football and the fact that he is now at war with his own club, Derry City, can’t obscure the fact that he is the fifth-most-capped Republic of Ireland international, having played 103 times.

I played 150 Premier League games over five seasons, 800 professional games and won a lot of individual accolades. I count that as success and don’t look back with regrets.” But there’s sadness, too, in the way his life and career were scarred by his refusal to wear the poppy when playing games around Remembrance Sunday in England. I’ve been stung bad.” McClean’s autobiography, The Walls, is one of the best sports books of the year.

It’s a powerful and sometimes disturbing read elevated by McClean’s willingness to show himself in an unflattering light. I have written a lot about Derry and boxing, and Bloody Sunday, but it helps to be back here to understand how McClean can respect the millions of soldiers who died in two world wars while refusing to forget how the British army killed so many Irish people in this city. He comes from Creggan, the estate affected most on Bloody Sunday in 1972 when 14 unarmed civilians were killed by the British army in Derry.

Six of the fatalities were from Creggan. In 2010, after the Saville report finally concluded that all the victims posed no threat, the British prime minister David Cameron apologised for the “unjustified and unjustifiable” massacre. McClean was born in Derry in 1989 and he writes that “learning how to make a petrol bomb was one of my first life lessons.

I was 11 before I’d properly mastered it.” He pauses when asked how he would feel if any of his three daughters or his son, who is 11, ended up making petrol bombs. It’s a different era now. I just want them to be proud to be Irish.” The 37-year-old spells out the contrast with his youth.