THE ROONEYS OF I RISH RUGBY?
A chance encounter at a late-night takeaway followed by a sex session in a hotel room, f ilmed on a friend’s mobile – no, not the latest antics of a Premier League footballer, but rather more close to home...
FOR the past week in Ireland, a story has been spreading around the internet like wildfire. A set of messages, taken from a Facebook and a mobile phone, have been passed from person to person countless times, leaving shock, horror and disgust in their wake.
The sordid messages detail a late-night encounter between a young woman and two Irish rugby stars. The well-known rugby players had been drinking with friends in a pub near Dublin’s Grafton Street, before going on to an exclusive nightclub where they were entertained in the VIP section. In the small hours of the morning, they went to a popular fast food chain for some greasy fare, just as thousands of other late-night revellers did in the capital that night.
For the two professional athletes, however, the night was not to end in a taxi ride home, but in a seedy encounter that could potentially leave a permanent black mark on their careers.
Outside the restaurant, the group met a young woman, seemingly by chance, who had also been out on the town for the night.
She accompanied them to a room — reportedly in a prominent city centre hotel — where she willingly engaged in sex with the two rugby stars. At least one other person — believed to be a friend of the men, who is himself a rugby player — was in the room. Using his mobile phone, he made a 22-minute recording of the encounter.
Details of the grubby affair first found their way into the public sphere last week when the young woman, who holds a senior position at a prominent company, sent a private message to her friend via Facebook.
In it, she enthusiastically detailed the night’s events, boasting about the encounter and jokingly describing herself as a ‘broken woman’.
The message was forwarded on and the contents of the conversation quickly went viral.
Not long afterwards, the graphic video of the sex session began to circulate among mobile phone users. Inevitably, it too found its way online where it was viewed by an unknown number of individuals before being deleted.
Also doing the rounds is a series of group messages in which, using coarse language and uncomfortably intimate detail, the man who made the video apparently tells his friends about what happened.
As both sets of messages spread uncontrolled — making headlines as far away as Australia — the reaction was two-sided. The players were lauded for their sexual escapades in some quarters, while the woman was subjected to a slew of abuse.
‘Your dad would be so proud,’ was one of the milder comments directed at
Irish rugby players have been held in the highest of esteem
her, while another squalid post read: ‘You absolute hero — you answered Ireland’s call.’
As the abuse mounted, the woman fled to England, but not before changing the username and picture on her Facebook account.
The professional rugby players involved can’t be named at this stage for legal reasons. However, the real question here is not their identities but whether this sleazy encounter is a sign that Irish rugby is becoming like the scandal-ridden Premier League.
Until now, Irish rugby players have been held in the highest of esteem both at home and internationally.
Since the game turned professional here in 1995, the personalities who have emerged have been clean-cut and dependable, as dedicated to their families as they are to their sport. Stars such as Jonathan Sexton and Paul O’Connell are role models who have helped build the reputation of Irish rugby into a seemingly unflappable brand.
Sexton married his childhood sweetheart Laura Priestley in a romantic ceremony a fortnight ago, while O’Connell and his l ong- term partner Emily O’Leary will celebrate their wedding in France today.
Then there’s Brian O’Driscoll. In his roles as Ireland and Leinster captain over the past decade, the Dublin man proved to be the ultimate poster boy for Irish rugby. Not only are his skills unparalleled, but he is known the world over for being a gentleman both on and off the pitch.
When he married actress and author Amy Huberman in 2010, their status as Ireland’s golden couple was cemented.
The players were lauded, the woman was subjected to abuse
Following the arrival of baby Sadie this year, O’Driscoll has added ‘doting father’ to his CV. Indeed, he melted hearts worldwide when he proudly paraded the five-month- old around the pitch after the British and Irish Lions’ series win last month.
Devoted, grounded and scandal-free, the O’Driscolls — and until this week’s shabby incident, the wider world of Irish rugby — encapsulate everything that the average Premier League soccer player is not. In a sport where astronomical salaries and unbridled adulation are de rigueur for young players, time and again we have seen sordid sex scandals arise across the water.
In 2000, for example, future England stars Rio Ferdinand, Frank Lampard and Kieron Dyer were caught on camera enjoying romps, including group sex, while on holiday in Ayia Napa in Cyprus. Like the Irish rugby players involved in the current scandal, they had met the women in the video at a latenight take-away in the early hours of the morning.
Ferdinand would go on to detail the incident in his 2007 autobiography, writing: ‘Some birds will buy you drinks all night, strip for you, get s*****d with other people in the room and do all sorts of tricks... It’s not the best thing when pictures of you having sex are published in the papers... As footballers, we had certain responsibilities that go with the job.’
In 2010 it appeared that Wayne Rooney had shirked his own responsibilities as a footballer and, indeed, a husband when prostitutes Jennifer Thompson and Helen Wood claimed to have had sex with him while his wife was pregnant with their first child. Thompson also claimed she had enjoyed three-ina-bed sex sessions with the footballer.
The unsavoury behaviour appeared to be something of a pattern for Rooney who, shortly after he met Coleen at age 16, was captured on CCTV visiting a brothel. He later admitted that he regretted sex sessions with a 48-yearold granny Patricia Tierney, who was known by the unpalatable monicker ‘Auld Slapper’.
The Premier League was again rocked last year when Ryan Giggs — the Manchester United and Wales stalwart and hero to millions of aspiring footballers — was outed as a serial adulterer.
When it became apparent in February 2012 that it was Giggs who was at the centre of a controversial court battle involving super-injunctions, privacy
It seems one of the players is aware of the damage it could cause to his career
and parliamentary privilege, the football fraternity was stunned.
Eventually, his extra-marital affair with former Miss Wales and Big Brother contestant Imogen Thomas was made public. But there was an even more distasteful twist to come. It transpired that the Manchester United star had also enjoyed an eight-year affair with Natasha Giggs, his brother’s wife.
Added to the sordid stories of this nature — and the many smutty kiss-and-tell interviews that inevitably follow — a multitude of reports of drunken, loutish acts, violence and even racist behaviour have helped to drag the image of the average Premier League footballer into the gutter.
It’s no wonder then that now, as news spreads of the late-night threesome, Irish rugby fans are horrified by the prospect that their own sport — once the shining pinnacle of respectability — could follow suit. Already speculation is mounting over exactly who the Irish rugby stars involved in the debauched incident were.
Both are respected players known for their clean- cut, boynext-door images with promising careers ahead of them.
More usually associated with charity drives and signing jerseys for eager young fans, no doubt the general public would be disgusted to learn what their off-pitch antics really entail.
Horrifying too is the company they appear to be keeping. The language, tone and disrespectful nature of the messages exchanged between friends of the two men are too graphic to print in a family newspaper. And although there is no question that the woman involved was a willing participant, her own boastful messages add another layer of grime to the story.
It would seem that at least one of the players is aware of the damage that this incident could cause to his career — and, indeed, his potential to attract lucrative sponsorship deals and endorsements in the future — as he has reportedly demanded that the original video be deleted.
It’s a case of too little, too l ate, however, as the messages describing the encounter have already been seen by thousands across the country.
Commentators who have come out in the players’ defence argue that professional sport is a world of relentless mickey- t aking and j uvenile pranks; that the principal topics of conversation in dressing rooms are money and sex, and that team sports are simply conducive to a pack mentality.
What these two players, as well as their team-mates and the next generation of rugby stars, needs to decide now is whether the pack will follow in the footsteps of the clean-cut role models who went before them, or that of the sleaze-ridden Premier League.