By Myles Palmer
Funnily enough, I was in Leeds yesterday.
We were walking down the hill into the city centre when, outside a newsagent, I saw a Yorkshire Evening Post board.
Three handwritten words: O’LEARY QUITS UNITED.
I was at the University of Leeds Open Day with Caroline and 5,000 seventeen year old girls.
I asked,”Why do girls outnumber boys by six to one?”
She said,”The boys can’t remember when the open days are.”
We did the sociology talk and the geography talk and had a late lunch in the refectory and inspected a hall of residence and then we strolled down towards the train station.
When I saw that board and found out that O’Leary had gone I thought : Mick McCarthy!
Mick knows Kelly, Keane and Harte. He’s on £350,000 with Ireland and he’d love to quadruple that. O’Leary was on £1.5 million.
Back home in London I was subjected to an absurd, insulting TV clip.
I was asked to believe that O’Leary comes home from a shopping trip and is ambushed outside his house by TV news teams and he says,”I went in this morning to tidy up a few bits and pieces and the chairman told me I’d been sacked.”
Pull the other one! Who do you think you’re kidding?
Rubbish, David! Stop taking the piss!
This was an insult to viewers and football fans everywhere. Does O’Leary think we are morons?
Why would a Premiership manager have booked a holiday in Sardinia starting TODAY and going into the first week of July, just when his work starts up again?
TRY THIS ALTERNATIVE SCENARIO :
O’Leary infuriates the PLC and loses the dressing room and gets the sack, but Peter Ridsdale says : do your World Cup punditry for the BBC and then go on holiday the day after we announce it.
28th June 2002.