McCarthy is unlikeliest of Colchester Utd supporters

BELIEVE it or not, I’m a Colchester United suporter. In our house it had to be Man United but I suppose then I got into my rebellious years...there was a programme on one night about Irish people in England and it happened to be about soccer that night and a player that went to Colchester. And for some unknown reason that team stuck in my head for years.

It was about 2013 and I decided I didn’t want to support Man United anymore, I wanted to go against everyone else and I decided I was supporting Colchester. My family all laughed at me and said ‘ah, he’ll get out of it in a week or two’ but I kept going and got more serious and I started going over. I used get the jersey for Christmas. It is a real family friendly club, it’s a shed of a ground, but it was great. They went up to the Championship so that’s how I started supporting them.

A few months ago I was doing a job in Johnstown House (in Kildare) and the Ireland physio, Tony McCarthy (no relation) was there. We were talking away and I had known he had played with Colchester, and I said ‘Tony, you’ll never believe this but I actually support the team you used played for, Colchester’.

“I said I remember watching a documentary when I was really young about Irish people in England going abroad to play (football), and he said ‘you’ll never believe it but that documentary was about me’.

“That’s when all the pieces came back together for me. And I’ve known Tony for the last four or five years, and I had an operation on my knee recently and he did a lot of work with me on it, and this is where is all came back to. I’d finally found the source of me supporting Colchester United.”