Rebels take football cause to the States
THE news this week that a company is to be set up to independently raise funds for the Cork footballers in the United States hints at a clarity of purpose sadly absent in the past.
Indeed, it is likely that the emergence of this new fundraising arm is likely to have been included in the terms that saw Ronan McCarthy agree to take the job in the first instance.
It has always been a battle for the footballers to raise funds and at times they had to park their dignity in more ways than one to get the dollars rolling in.
A couple of years back a delegation, pretty much under the cover of darkness, also travelled to New York.
However, without a setpiece event to hang it on, they were reduced to shaking down businessmen with Cork lineage in late night bars.
Thankfully that will be a thing of the past with a major event already in the pipeline for San Francisco next year, which should also mean that players, as they did last year, will no longer have to cobble together a make-shift gym to train.
And it should also mean that they will never have to lean entirely on a board which, in the dark old prestrike days, could have won gold for Ireland in the penny pinching Olympics.
On the train home from a National League game in the early Noughties when McCarthy was still playing, one of his teammates ordered a second bottle of cola – nutrition was not cutting edge at the time – with his dinner.
The glass had not touched his lips before he got a tap on the shoulder from a board officer.
‘You will pay for that second one yourself,’ said Mr Scrooge.
Lesson learned, they will happily pay for themselves now.