from The Sunday Times
Brendan O’Carroll, below, must be improving. Nearly 15 years with a reputation as one of the country’s leading funnymen and he’s finally made us laugh with his €60m proposal to save Shamrock Rovers. The ‘entertainer’ is not only going to finish Rovers’ stadium but is, magically, going to make himself and his mystery backers a tidy profit in the process.
A lot of Rovers fans are, understandably, elated with the news but a cursory glance at O’Carroll’s history of attempted purchases of Irish clubs suggests the proposal should, at the very least, be taken with extreme caution. In the early 1990s, O’Carroll met the directors of Kilkenny City and, on top of offending them with, ahem, the suggestive quality of his jokes he put a £1m offer on the table. Their negative answer included several retorts, one of the more printable being: ‘Over my dead body’. In 1997 he was approached by a director of Home Farm with a view to investing in the club. They looked at his proposal which involved a hotel, retail outlets and, sure why not, a helicopter pad and ran a mile. ‘It was a very ambitious plan,’ said one director. ‘Too far-fetched. It wasn’t the right direction for us.’ There were other flirtations too and now the story moves on to Rovers. O’Carroll once said: ‘My ma made me believe I could fly. “Just take off any time you want, Brendan — you can fly, man. All you've got to do is flap your arms”.’ Oh good, a dreamer and a visionary. Just what the Eircom League needs.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article...976219,00.html
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