Martin O’Neill seemed a little bit shooken up recalling last night’s car crash on the M50.
The Republic of Ireland boss, along with some of the management team including Roy Keane, were involved in a collision on the Dublin motorway on Tuesday evening but everyone was present at a sunny Malahide this morning reporting for training.
The Derry man spoke about the incident after the session which saw the return of Robbie Keane back to the fold after playing for LA Galaxy at the weekend.
“Yeah, we’re fine. We’re fine. I’ll survive,” O’Neill recalled the incident last night.
“Not a great deal [to say on the crash]. We just got shomped from the back but I’ll speak for myself when I say I’m feeling not so bad.”
Asked if it was a scary thing to be involved in, the manager hesitated.
“I think… Yeah, it’s… listen, we’re fine.”
And, of course, he wasn’t particularly keen on telling anyone what they were doing with their day off.
“Oh, I don’t think that’s very important. In the scheme of life, I don’t think it’s important,” he said. “If I really wanted you to know that, maybe I should go on Twitter and tell people what I’m doing every 10 minutes. We were okay.
“I gave the players a little bit of time and I think they were okay. Some of them played a little bit of golf and they all reported back last night.”
Alex Pearce said that the squad were able to laugh about what had happened in the end.
“We heard about that yesterday, yeah,” the defender said. “We heard they got into a little bit of a crash but thankfully they were all okay, they were all smiling and everything was a little bit of a joke then. We had a little bit of banter between the lads but it was nothing serious so no harm done.”
But Martin O’Neill doesn’t believe that he would have been the subject of that ‘banter’.
“They may have slagged some of the other staff but they certainly didn’t slag me,” the boss stated sternly.
The talk did lead to quite possibly the most bizarre interview question of all time when Alex Pearce was asked, in no uncertain terms, ‘Would you like to rear-end Roy Keane?’
“What?” He was puzzled, of course he was.
“That came out wrong,” the journalist replied.
“Clearly…” Alex Pearce wasn’t any less bemused.
“In a car…” the question is only very slightly better now. Very slightly. Very, very slightly.
“Would you?” Pearce threw the question back.
“Definitely not,” he was told.
Well that’s that cleared up then.
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