'I was impulsive in some comments but I do not believe in regrets in life'

He is a man who can put in a transfer request so he can leave Manchester United to join York City. He is a pundit who can describe Michel Platini as over-rated at the precise moment when the Frenchman is leading his side to a European Championship. He is a biographer who can cause discord with his subjects, most notably U2.

His biggest fall-out, though, was with Ireland. The nation was having a party in 1990 when Charlton led them not only to World Cup qualification in Italy but to the knockout stages. Dunphy, in effect, gatecrashed the celebration, scandalised the merrymakers and started a rammy. His contention was that Charlton was ordering his team to play anti-football. He despaired at performance, rather than exulted over results. He became an exile in his own land as his views were broadcast on national television and in the press. He left a hotel in Dublin once and every driver on the taxi rank refused to take him. "The whole rank said: 'F*** off'. That really hurt," says Dunphy.

It was yet another moment that could have caused him to reflect on his "dissident journalism" but he adds: "I do not believe in regrets in life. I was intemperate and impulsive in some comments but I do not regret the Charlton thing. The whole nation was having a party and that is great. But the football was lousy. It was the worst World Cup in history."

It was not only taxi drivers who shunned the prophet. "A cabinet minister rang me up to tell me I was making a fool of myself," he says. "She had only become interested in football three weeks earlier. But this king had no clothes. It was an interesting experience," he says.

It was the most high-profile of a series of controversies that both dog and are instigated by Dunphy. He talks in his autobiography of the "merciless tyranny of poverty" that reigned in his childhood in Dublin. It is tempting to ascribe his restlessness, his anger and his drive to this experience. "Yeah, it was a formative experience in terms of justice. Seeing injustice and confronting it," he says. "As a kid I looked at the church and the government and how they affected ordinary people. I was politically conscious without knowing I was politically conscious."

Small and shy, he found liberation on the football pitch. He signed for Manchester United in 1962 but left after three years. Matt Busby, a subject of a brilliant Dunphy biography, did not play the Irishman and the next move was to York City.

It was at Millwall, though, that Dunphy grew as a writer and a personality. Only a Game?, published in 1976, is an unflinching examination of life as a footballer with all its insecurities and stern challenges. "Going to England was a liberation for me," he says. "It rescued me. It was a liberation from prejudice. I found the English to be tolerant."

Dunphy is most merciless on his own failings. His autobiography rattles with proclamations of his cowardice and accusations of self-absorption. He pinpoints a clash with Dave Mackay, who was then playing for Derby County, as a defining moment in his career. Dunphy, playing for Millwall, admits he pulled out of a challenge with the great Scot, allowing Mackay to score. There are Sherman tanks who would automatically find reverse gear in any confrontation with Mackay but Dunphy is brutal on what he regards as his cowardice.

"I saw danger and the really brave guys just do not see danger. They see the ball and go for it. I had a low pain threshold and I was slight. Both these things were against me. It was unforgiveable against Mackay because it cost us the match. That single act. The only people who knew about it were my team-mates and manager. I had a great write-up in the papers the next day but I knew that I had bottled it," he says.

Yet this description of physical cowardice is balanced by his acceptance of a moral bravery when facing what he believes is injustice or tilting at accepted opinion. "I stood up for people and myself," he says of his playing career. He carried this trait into his journalism. There is a perversity about Dunphy that is almost wilful, self-destructive. He once refused to wear a tie in a studio, threatening a television career in its infancy.

Gloriously, he takes this characteristic into bigger fields. He was the perfect ghost for Roy Keane's autobiography and applauds the appointment of the former Manchester United and Celtic player to the Irish management team under the leadership of Martin O'Neill. "It is a positive move for the country," he says. "He will bring high intelligence and strong leadership. There is a difficulty, though. Roy has spent his career railing against power. Now he is the power so he has to handle that."

The railing against power continues for Dunphy. "The state of my country is exercising me. The destruction of it. The persecution of the vulnerable, the old and the sick," he says. "I am still passionate about football and I believe Roy Hodgson got away with it over that 'feed the monkey' stuff," he says in relation to the England manager's half-time talk in the Poland match. "Racism is endemic in football and Hodgson's comment was deeply shocking."

His autobiography hints at the toll his outspokenness caused his family, particularly his working-class father and mother. "My family were ordinary decent, private people. My mother thought people in public were mouthing off, attention seeking and basically telling lies. She did not like me to be in that arena even though I was confronting a lot of the lies. My father was not crazy about it," he says.

The saddest line in the book is when his father refuses Dunphy a loan when the former footballer has lost another job. "It was 'no'. You have walked into this, I'm not bailing you out," Dunphy says of the refusal. The subject was not mentioned again but Dunphy was never silenced. He talks of the feeling in his family "that to be famous you had to be some kind of fraud".

The celebrated controversialist is a walking repudiation of this belief. His autobiography is raw, fascinating and authentic. "I wanted it to be true," says Dunphy. It is. In a story replete with disputes, there can be no argument about that.

n The Rocky Road, by Eamon Dunphy, is published by Penguin at £20