Irish footballing treasure, Brian Kerr, made one of his myriad weekly media appearances on Today FM's World of Football with Phil Egan and Neil Treacy last Saturday evening. The two hosts were pondering some of the strangest items thrown onto the field of play, following the frankly weird behavior of Brondby fans, who festooned the field with dead rats during the Copenhagen derby. Some of the other items mentioned the pig's head that was chucked at Luis Figo by Barcelona fans, and a moped that Inter Milan fans threw down a stand of the San Siro.
Brian Kerr was listening in, and somewhat unsurprisingly, Kerr said he remembered the tossing of the moped. Then, in a surreal twist, Kerr revealed that he used to breed rats in UCD. Better explained in his words...
I think I was at the match with the motorbike. It might have been Inter/Atalanta because I remember seeing something mad coming down from the third tier and landing in the first tier.
Anyway, going back to the rats. I was a caretaker of rats in a previous existence. So the squeamishness of rats you were talking about there, Phil, I 'm thinking of you being very girly about it. I was part of a very important scientific experiment where we used to breed rats; they were huge, huge rats. They were on feeding trials in my days as a lab technician with the Department of Agriculture in UCD.
Part of the work also involved taking blood from the rats, and doing some testing on those rats. The blood-taking job wasn't the handiest one. It actually involved getting a piece of capillary tubing at the back of the eye of the rat.
Another part of my job was to go in on weekends to make sure they were well-fed and well-watered rats and occasionally there would have been escapee rats running around the floor, who escaped out of the cages. So I got quite handy at capturing white rats on the floor. Overall I thought it was good training for managing in the League of Ireland!
Utterly surreal. You can listen to the full slot below [from 4.30], or over on Today FM's website.
