It is the early hours, we are in a King’s Cross boozer and Niall Quinn is bemoaning the fate of his beloved Sunderland. A city that has lost its coalmines and its shipyards is fast losing faith with its football club as Sunderland, weighed down by debt, plummet out of the top flight.

It is then that Quinn reveals that he is going to mount a buyout of his former club and turn the Stadium of Light once more into a beacon of hope. If you didn’t know the man, you might have wondered what was in his Guinness.

That was in spring 2006 and now, in a different pub, Quinn is laughing at what he let himself in for. He has been manager and chairman, negotiated bank loans and transfers, discovered a billionaire backer in America and wrestled with the uniquely challenging character that is Roy Keane.

“It is like being an air traffic controller, trying to stop everything crashing into each other,” he said, as several telephones start ringing all at once. “Some days I do think, ‘Shouldn’t I be playing golf three days a week and sitting up there with Richard Keys laughing at everyone else trying to make sense of this thing?’ ”

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Some of his romantic ideals have been challenged but Quinn clings resolutely to the belief that if any city in the world deserves a thriving football club, it is Sunderland. “This place reminds me of home in Dublin,” he said. “It’s been a love affair. I spent the best years of my life here and I still feel I owe them something. Put it down to that whole Irish Catholic guilt thing.”

Phase one

In the summer of 2006, Quinn put together the Drumaville consortium of Irish businessmen. He was always going to be chairman but ended up as manager for five matches, all of them lost. “I won’t be doing it again,” he said, with a grimace.

He brought in two free transfers. Kenny Cunningham, a former team-mate recruited to solidify the defence, gave away two goals in the first half of his home debut and was booed off.

“My other, Arnau Riera, he had lovely technical ability and I thought, ‘Let’s give him a free role against Bury in the Carling Cup,’ ” Quinn said. “We worked on it for four days, me and Bobby Saxton, and he got sent off in the first three minutes. I looked up to the heavens and thought, ‘Jesus, would you ever get Roy to take this thing.’ ”

That night Keane took a call from his sister who had seen a shell-shocked Quinn giving an interview on television. “You’d better take that job, Niall’s gonna have a heart attack,” she told her brother. “Really?” Keane said. “Let’s wait another week.”

Phase two

The rest of us can speculate about the character flaws laid bare by Keane’s abrupt resignation last month but Quinn is thankful for two and a bit years of almost unbroken success. Keane grabbed hold of a club at the foot of the Coca-Cola Championship and hauled them to mid-table in the Barclays Premier League. “Roy suited the job perfectly for that part of the journey,” Quinn said. “We’d have loved him to have gone on a bit longer but Roy raised aspirations here for everybody.