FURIOUS Brian Kerr once took the news that his captain was leaving the club so badly that he told him to “stick his tea and biscuits up his b****x”.
Before he became an icon at Bohemians, Tony ‘Toccy’ O’Connor first had leave St Pat’s — but when he told his Richmond Park gaffer, all hell broke loose.
The defender was part of a league-winning Saints side in 1990 which, for financial reasons, began to break up afterwards.
With Curtis Fleming, John McDonnell, and Pat Fenlon leaving the club, when Toccy — who was skipper at the time — decided to follow suit, he felt he had to break the news gently.
He told The Irish Sun’s This Is Your LOIfe podcast: “Financially, Pat’s couldn’t compete at the time with other big clubs like Shamrock Rovers and Derry City. I got an approach from Bohs.
“And as it turns out, I was the captain of the team when I was leaving, which didn’t make it too easy either, because Brian was looking to me as captain to stay.
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“Myself and my wife, and I had my young lad, Pierce, at the time, and we were living up in Tallaght in my sister-in-law’s house.
“But I was saying to Elaine, ‘Brian’s coming up tonight, so we’ll have a chat when he comes. Ask him if he wants tea or biscuits’.
“We’d just go into the sitting room and have a little chat. She said, ‘Yeah, no problem’.
“My mother-in-law was up there as well. She was always there to have a listen. So Brian came up, and, ‘How are you, Brian? You know Elaine, that’s her mother, blah, blah. Would you like a cup of tea? Biscuit?’. We go inside, so Elaine went out and her mum to make the cup of tea.
“So while they were doing that, we were talking, and I said, ‘Listen, Brian, I think I need a change. I need to freshen up’.
“I’ve made my mind up, I’m not re-signing. And he lost it.
“He says, ‘I’ve heard of the rats leaving the sinking ship, but the captain going first?’ and he told me to F off.”
Just as Elaine was about to come in with the tea, Toccy recalled how Brian turned to him and said: “You can stick them tea and biscuits up your b******s.”
Toccy, 58, went to Bohs, and it was a few years before he and Kerr made their peace.
He spent over a decade at Dalymount Park, winning two titles and an FAI Cup and enjoyed some big nights in Europe.
This included victory over Aberdeen in the Uefa Cup and a 1993-94 Uefa Cup clash against a Bordeaux side boasting Zinedine Zidane, Christophe Dugarry and Bixente Lizarazu — who would all win the World Cup with France a few years later.
After holding them to a single-goal defeat at home, the Bohs lads discussed on the way out for the return leg how they had a real chance.
Toccy said: “We can hold them for the first 15 minutes and sneak a goal. We might have a chance of turning this… they just absolutely destroyed us.”
While playing for Pat’s against Dynamo Bucharest, he noticed for the first time how more professional clubs on the continent were.
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He explained: “And it was just a different level. Different fitness levels and physique. Small fat fellas, tall fat fellas, skinny fat fellas. Skinny small fellas.”
Later for Bohs, against former European Cup winners Steaua Bucharest, it reared its head again.
He said: “We were beaten 1-0, as far as I can remember. And of course, as we do, straight into Club M on the Wednesday night, celebrating that we were beaten 1-0.”
Towards the end of his time at Dalymount, future Ireland boss Stephen Kenny took over as the club moved towards full time.
BAD BLOOD
As O’Connor had his own jewellery business and was well into his 30s by then, he stayed part-time while the rest of the squad dedicated themselves to the job.
It created bad blood between him and Kenny, and it came to a head when the player refused to train on Christmas Day 2002.
He told Neil O’Riordan: “We were playing the day after Stephen’s Day against Pat’s.
“I made myself available every morning of the week up to Christmas in Malahide where we’d train and then apparently we’re training on Christmas Day. And I said, ‘We’re not training on Christmas Day’. Oh, apparently we are.
“I said to the lads, ‘I’m not training on Christmas Day, I’m sorry’, and a few lads said, ‘Oh we’re all together’.
TRAINING CLASH
“I said, ‘Stephen, I can’t’. He says, ‘Why? I said, ‘I’ve got a wife and kids and it’s Christmas’.
“He said, ‘Oh I have wife and kids as well’. I said, ‘Well then you should know, Stephen, where you’re going to be’.”
“He says, ‘I expect you there’. And Christmas morning — you know Christmas morning with kids — I never even thought of training.
“And then we had training on Stephen’s Day and I went up to Dalymount for the match against Pat’s and they’re all, ‘You went up there yesterday?’ I says, ‘Tell me you all didn’t go?’. Everybody went.
“So Stephen pulled me, he says, ‘I gave you an option to be there. You said you chose not to be, so you won’t be starting tomorrow’.”
Toccy says the pair mutually agreed to end his time at Bohs, but there was a resolution.
APOLOGY
A few years later, Kenny would apologise to O’Connor for how he handled some of those issues.
He added: “(Kenny said) ‘Listen, I want to apologise for the way I handled it. I was wrong. I was wrong the way I handled it. And the whole situation leading up to it, I didn’t take into consideration that you were part-time with a young family and stuff like that’.
“I said, ‘That’s no problem, Stephen. It’s football’. Now, I see him every now and again. I don’t hold grudges. Life’s too short for that for that s***e.”
