My United: Rugby union legend Brian O’Driscoll
On St Patrick’s Day, we’ve had a look through our archives and come across this classic ‘My United’ interview from the March 2016 edition of our monthly magazine, where the sporting great explains his attachment to the club, recalls a Giggsy-like try against Australia and analyses the prospect of King Eric playing rugby…
When and why did you start supporting United?“Throughout the 1980s in Dublin there were two soccer teams that most people supported – United and Liverpool. And with it being Liverpool’s heyday, it was predominantly Liverpool that people supported. I probably should have supported Liverpool because most of my buddies were Liverpool fans. But I had cousins who were from Manchester and they came over to Dublin to visit when I was about four or five. They asked me who I supported and I said I didn’t really know. So they said, ‘That’s it, you are supporting Manchester United. That’s the end of it’. Ironically, one of my cousins who is involved in that family is Gary O’Driscoll, who used to be the Irish Rugby doctor and later worked at Arsenal – it was his family who were the original instigators as to why I support United! I just missed the Stapleton, Moran and McGrath era; I remember collecting the United stickers for the Panini album around 1987/88 and I remember buying those chunky VHS tapes of United games – I think Hughes and McClair were United’s top scorers. That was the start of me becoming a really passionate United supporter. I would have known the tape backwards.”
