‘I knew they’d planned something’

FERNANDO Lafuente Saiz said he knew his old club Ballybrack FC had planned to stage something to get a match called off – but thought it would be that he had broken a leg, not that he had died.

He only found out about the actual stunt when his employer spotted the death notices and tributes to the player online.

Mr Lafuente, who moved to Galway in September to work for software company GloFox, said the south Dublin club had told him they might claim he had an accident as a way of avoiding playing the game against Arklow. ‘I was aware there was going to be some story on me but I thought it was going to be me breaking a leg,’ he told RTÉ.

He added: ‘I knew I was going to have an accident .... I thought it was going to be seamless accident like nobody cares. They told me if you see anything on Twitter or whatever, that we tried to get this match called off.’

Mr Lafuente Saiz said the club has since apologised to him. ‘As soon as I heard the news, I wrote to them,’ he said. ‘They got straight back to me and told me what was going on and they apologised. It’s serious on their part but I’m finding it a little bit funny. Because basically, I’m not dead. And no-one has actually been harmed here.’

Ballybrack’s game against Arklow Town on Saturday was postponed, while other teams in the Leinster Senior League held a minute’s silence in honour of the amateur player. The league also posted a notice of his death in the Herald newspaper before it was discovered that Mr Lafuente Saiz was alive and well.