Wiser Liam Lawrence steps into the real world

Banter with the lads, Part 2

Liam Lawrence is in the hotel room in Malahide he shares with Stephen Kelly, who is playing his guitar. Lawrence is playing on his X Box over the internet with two friends of his in Ballymun, while talking to them at the same time through a headset.

Some of his Republic of Ireland teammates - and in no time at all - are hooked on the gadgetry; Paul McShane texted him the other night to ask what games to get; Kieren Westwood and Andy Keogh are also converts. The rest of the lads, maybe not.

His two friends in Ballymun are called Colin Gorman and Glenn Doyle, aka Snoop Doggy Doyle. "The two guys are famous in our dressing room now. Duffer and Keano are always asking 'how's Snoop?' It's good banter."

It is nice to be reporting on such trivia in the life of Lawrence. He remembers with a slight shake of the head that it was three years ago this month that he moved from Sunderland to Stoke City, at a time when he was going into meltdown.

His international career seemed stillborn after he was called to Steve Staunton's first squad; he was the only unused substitute for a friendly against Sweden and was then dropped unceremoniously.

A video of his sexual indiscretions with a girl in her late teens was doing the rounds on Wearside and he had also had a no-holds barred falling out with Roy Keane, which left him without a future at Sunderland and a bad reputation to live down with other clubs. However, Tony Pulis at Stoke was prepared to take a chance and has been richly rewarded for his gamble.

"I've matured massively since then," Lawrence says, "With my football, off the field and the way I approach managers. It's experience. What I did with Roy, I probably wouldn't do now. I would handle it a bit differently, but I was young and hot-headed - and he is hot-headed - and it just exploded."

The irony of their respective career paths since then isn't lost on Lawrence, though he refuses to gloat. Lawrence has been Championship Player of the Year, Stoke player of the year and played an important role in Stoke's sparkling run-in to the end of last season which saw them achieve a mid-table finish, when most people expected them to be relegated.

His long-overdue recall into the Ireland squad then saw him score a spectacular goal against South Africa in Thomond Park in his second appearance and he was arguably Ireland's best player when Giovanni Trapattoni entrusted him with a place in the starting line-up for the game against Italy at Croke Park last month.

Quick thinking allowed him to set up the opening goal for Glenn Whelan and while his Stoke City teammate lost his way after that, so emotional had he become in scoring, Lawrence showed he had the head for the big occasion. "At my age now [27] I've been involved in some really big games at Old Trafford and Arsenal and all these places. Beforehand, I was looking round at the massive stadium, but as soon as the whistle goes the game is there and it is just another game of football."

Still, after waiting years for his big opportunity, the scale of his achievement was not lost on him. Back in Cheshire, when he closed his front door after that momentous night at Croke Park, there was plenty to savour and reflect on.

"I put the game on the telly and watched it a couple of times over a glass of wine. It is a big moment in my life, that game, and we were that close to doing something historic."

Lawrence's professional career is packed with incident, controversy, big highs and deep lows, but the dramatic twist provided by his selection for Ireland over the last couple of months has served to remind him of another moment that would otherwise be forgotten forever, involving Stuart Watkiss, the manager at his first professional club, Mansfield Town.

"We had lost a couple of games on the spin and Stuart came in and he said 'I'm no f****** Trapattoni. I can't work miracles with you lot'. I remember thinking 'who's Trapattoni?' I didn't know anything about Trapattoni at the time because I was young and I was only interested in the English game."

He is suitably impressed by what he has seen of Trapattoni so far, though he has seen that the Italian is no miracle worker either, instead relying on his players to carry out a very exact and narrowly defined game plan. It was Trapattoni's conservatism which delayed Lawrence's elevation into the Irish squad for so long - not to mention his noted reluctance to go to see the plethora of Irish players that Stoke have had on their books over the last couple of seasons - and Lawrence is under strict instructions about what his role is on the right side of midfield.

"At Stoke it is different. Sometimes I am out wide and the manager wants you to push on without the ball to make space for others. You get drafted into the Ireland squad and you get told to play inside and then track the fullback. Trap likes you to come inside, pick the ball up and drive infield."

Lawrence did enough right against Italy to suggest that he will get the nod ahead of Aiden McGeady for the slot on the right side of midfield, particularly if Trapattoni is more interested in stemming the runs of Patrice Evra down the left, than in trying to orchestrate incursions of his own.

Trapattoni will no doubt be interested to see how Lawrence gets on today when Stoke play Hull City today at the KC Stadium. Hull came up to the Premier League the same season as Stoke and their unraveling only serves to highlight further how well Tony Pulis has done, even though he has had nothing like Phil Brown's budget to spend on players and their wages.

Pulis and Brown are contemporaries as players and managers, but there the comparisons end. While the Hull manager likes to portray a larger than life image, Pulis is a down-to-earth character, whose careful spending has allowed other developments such as the construction of new facilities at the training ground, now casting shadows over the temporary structures the players have had to put up with for years.

"I honestly think the manager loves the Portakabins as a means of keeping our feet on the ground and not letting us get carried away with the big fancy stuff. I think he'll be trying to stall the new building, he is so old-school in that respect," Lawrence says. "Seriously though, he is a fantastic manager who is really going places and that is not just me trying to be teacher's pet."

It helps that Pulis awarded Lawrence with a new four-year contract during the summer, and while the player appreciates the show of confidence, he is desperate to prove that he is worth it. Lawrence may have matured, but there is still an edge to him that marks him out from others and shouldn't be pared away.

He mentions in passing that he has never met his two friends from Ballymun, but left two tickets at the ground for them to be collected for the Italy game, and they came back to him afterwards to say they were the best seats they ever had. Lawrence is winning friends and influencing people. At last.