Racing: 'I've learnt a severe lesson. There was never any cruelty'

The ex-footballer who wants to do a Channon has his training licence back. But he isn't bitter

Freedom. When a man's sentence is completed the feeling of exhilaration does not come much better than this, even if he has only been liberated to train his own racehorses. Mick Quinn sniffs the west Oxfordshire air and scrutinises a trio of his charges who range into view. The gallop is only three furlongs, but it's a severe incline. The newly reinstated trainer's string surge past us, exhalation pumping from their nostrils as rhythmically as steam engines. One, a dark grey, named Byo, is slightly behind the others. "Eh, Fiona. Keep him going," the Liverpudlian yells out to his young work rider. "You know he'll take the piss with you. That's it. Good girl." The trainer turns and declares: "He's old and wise and he'll misbehave if he can, even though he had his bollocks taken out last year."

Quinn feels like he's been similarly treated. The former Premiership striker still believes he was kicked in them by the Jockey Club when racing's ruling body suspended his licence to train for three years – reduced to 18 months on appeal – in 2000 after three horses in his care were reported in an emaciated condition, de- spite the mitigating circumstances.

Yesterday, on Lingfield's all-weather track, Quinn saddled his second runner since that hiatus, the three-year-old Landescent, owned by the former Liverpool player David Thompson, who is now with Blackburn Rovers. The football connection does not end there and the trainer hopes that factor will be an asset as he attempts to reconstruct his career. "Dietmar Hamann [Liverpool's German midfielder] used to own a horse with me and I've been speaking to Francis Jeffers [the Arsenal striker]. Hopefully, they'll support me. Thankfully, I've also kept the nucleus of loyal owners."

Quinn adds: "When Karen [the daughter of Bob Davies, winner of the 1978 Grand National on Lucius, who is his wife and training partner] and I started five years ago we had f***-all. We didn't have a muck-sack, a horse or a saddle. At least, starting again, everything's in place. I thought I was just turning the corner, training winners from moderate horses. People were starting to believe in me. Now I'm almost back to square one. But I've got 14 horses here now and the team are better than when I started."

From a nation of animal lovers, he understands there will be no sympathy from some quarters at his fate. Yet, he still insists the punishment, which deprived him of his livelihood, was harsh. I suggest to him that the action would have been nowhere near so draconian if the offender had been the owner of a powerful Newmarket yard rather than a small trainer, an irreverent Scouser and a former footballer. He maintains his own counsel – "I don't want to come out of this looking all bitter and twisted" – but there are plenty in racing who would concur.

"Basically, one horse in particular lost quite a bit of weight through three or four factors," he says. "It kept throwing its rug off every night, it was 2000, the wettest winter on record, and I was away. The horse should have been brought straight in by the lad left in charge. He actually left all of them out for a further week and didn't inform me that anything was wrong."

Quinn adds: "I've been slaughtered by some of the media and people who read the papers will just think it was about cruelty and neglect, but there was never any involved. I've learnt a severe lesson and it's not going to happen again."

In fleece top, casual trousers and trainers, he does not portray the image of the archetypal trainer. His sharp vowels – the product of a childhood on the tough Cantrill Farm Estate in Liverpool, where his father still runs a pub, the Black Angus – no doubt grate among the extended ones of east Oxfordshire, here on the edge of the Vale of the White Horse. He doesn't give a damn. "I've always gone back to Liverpool and topped up me Scouse accent so I can piss everyone off down here," he says mischievously.

Quinn senior apparently had some perfunctory advice for his son when his training licence was suspended. "Me dad said I should tell them to shove the whole racing game up their arse. But it's something I'm passionate about; it's something I love. I must be mad coming back into it because you don't make money at this. If you're paying wages, buy feed and hay, and you break even, you're doing well. You're just waiting on those really good horses to turn a profit."

He has at least one, a flying sprint filly Dragon Flyer, at the historic East Manton stables he leases in the idyllic village of Sparsholt, whom he hopes will be the standard-bearer. She was second in a Listed race last season. With the start of the turf Flat season two months distant, he is preparing her and his other charges to reach the peak fitness required for the racecourse. Most, inevitably, still carry some "condition", something the Mighty Quinn was accused of in a 15-year career in which he played for nine clubs, including Newcastle United.

"I'd get called all the names, Sumo and all that, but I'd just smile and stick one in the net to shut them up," Quinn says. "You don't play 511 League games as a striker [scoring 228 goals in the process] if you're not fit. It never wound me up. At West Ham once, somebody threw a pie and I caught half and stuck it in my mouth and ate it. Better than me turning round giving a V-sign and inciting a riot. They loved the banter."

Had fortune been on hand, Quinn might have turned to management, of two-legged athletes. "I applied for the Burnley job, as player-manger, when I came back from Greece in '95, and got down to the last three, but Adrian Heath got it. It made my mind up that racing was my game."

His involvement in the sport was initially as a gambler. "I'd hang about betting shops after school when I was 15, getting people to put on me pound or fifty pence each-ways. Once I started playing football, I'd get me money and just blow it. I'd bet on two flies crawling up the wall. I suppose I've wasted hundreds of thousands on horses, cards, everything, since I was 15. But I've enjoyed every f******* minute of it. I've spent beyond my means. If I hadn't I'd have probably had lots more money in the bank. But would I have been any happier if I hadn't have done it?"

In the circumstances, the 40-year-old Quinn finds it difficult to comprehend the current brouhaha about the gambling and card-playing habits of footballers generally, and Michael Owen specifically. "Yes, Michael likes a bet, he loves his racehorses. But he doesn't smoke, he doesn't drink, he doesn't womanise. He's got that much f******* money, what's it matter? It's only if you're betting beyond your means, and it's affecting things like mortgages, that you've got a big problem. You can rattle off so many: Kerry Dixon, Kenny Sansom, Peter Shilton, Paul Merson. But they weren't on 70 grand a week."

When still a player, Quinn became an owner with Mick Channon, who is now a neighbour in nearby Lambourn, with whom he played at Portsmouth. "I soon started helping Mick out and the general feel of it went beyond punting. It became a genuine love for the horse."

In his first three seasons as a trainer, he saddled 38 winners from a limited number of horses. "I've seen what Mick [Channon] has achieved, starting from maybe 12 horses," says Quinn. "He's now got 150 over there now. I don't think I'd want that many, but I'd settle for 50 quality horses which could compete at the top level. I'll give myself two or three years, but if it's not working I don't want to stick around in the second or third division. He pauses. "You never know, I might be back to football management..."

You doubt it. Somehow you suspect that Quinn enjoys his freedom too much for that.