I’ve never particularly liked Alan Shearer -- as a person, that is. You can’t deny a striker whose banged in 283 goals in the Premiership, 206 of them for his beloved Newcastle United. Not forgetting the 30 he netted for England in 63 international appearances. Shearer, however, always came over to me in his playing days as a bland, colourless character whose guarded comments invariably hid his true feelings.

Now that he’s retired, I’m more impressed with the Geordie hero's emerging personality as a BBC TV Match of the Day summariser. It’s a bit like the David Beckham syndrome -- monosyllabic youngster opens up with maturity and demonstrates that he’s not as dull as he sounds. Now that he has no club bosses to answer to, Shearer  probably feels he can be more open in expressing his opinions.
But that’s not the point I'm trying to make: The man I used to love to hate (well, not hate exactly, but he bored me silly off the field) has just become the second member of football’s Band of Angels. How? By donating the entire £1.6 million proceeds of his sell-out testimonial game against Celtic in May to North-East charities -- including the NSPCC, of which he is a patron, and The Bobby Moore Fund.

Shearer was, of course, beaten to the punch in the charity stakes by arguably the game’s greatest gentleman -- Niall Quinn. The 6ft 4in former Arsenal, Manchester City and Sunderland striker became a true giant of the game in 2002 when he handed over the £1million proceeds of his own testimonial match between Sunderland and the Republic of Ireland to charity -- an act for which he received an honorary MBE.

Unlike Shearer, I always liked Niall as a person -- an opinion compounded by the couple of occasions I was lucky enough to meet him. Quiet-spoken and immensely polite, one could not help but take to the gentle Irish giant. And in these days where big money seems far more important to football people than being nice to their fellow men and women, that is a wonderful characteristic.

I spent many years reporting football for a variety of national newspapers. And while most  players and managers were reasonably approachable, only a handful showed a genuine warmth towards the press. And why should they be nice to intrusive reporters, you might ask. Well, why shouldn’t they? Particularly as we are, after all, only representing the man in the street.

Strangely enough, one of the most helpful managers I ever interviewed was Graham Taylor, who, after the ‘Turnip Head’ barrage he had to endure from The Sun during his England stewardhip, had more reason than most to despise the media. I suspect the fact he was so amenable had something to do with the fact that his father, Tom Taylor, was himself a journalist -- having been a ‘resident’ in the Scunthorpe United press box seemingly for generations.

Anyway, I once asked Graham, who had been delayed beyond his planned departure time, for a comment as he rushed to get on to the Watford team bus following a match at Bolton’s Burnden Park. "No problem - but you’ll have to run along beside me,’’ he said. I got my interview…and a good one it was, too. Compare that with a similar situation at Burnley, when I and a colleague from the Daily Express -- refused entry to the players’ area by a band of jobsworths -- waited for 30 minutes in pouring rain to interview then Blackpool boss Alan Ball. We were like drowned rats when Bally finally emerged from the hospitality room and headed for the team coach.

‘’Excuse me, Alan, could we have a quick word about the match?’’ my colleague asked. Ball didn’t even look at us. ‘’No!’’ he barked, turning his back on us and making a rude run for the bus.

But I’m straying from the point here. This is aimed at sanctifying the football stars who choose not to be greedy and to help the needy. I accept that Shearer and Quinn aren’t the only players to have given large handouts to good causes. In fact, I’ll bet the majority do. But I have to question what happened to the proceeds of Ryan Giggs’s testimonial match against Celtic at the start of the 2001-02 season.

Now perhaps Giggsy prefers to make his donations to charity without a fanfare. But it would be nice to know how much of the fans’ hard-earned money went into the Manchester United hero’s own pocket after that game because I, for one, would find it obscene if  those funds found their way into the already-bulging pockets of a multi-millionaire.