Darren O’Dea has not had your typical football career. The Irish international is back in Glasgow having ended his contract with Metalurh Donetsk in Ukraine last month due to the unrest in the region. Currently without a club, the 27 year old speaks to Jarlath Reagan on the “Irishman abroad” podcast tomorrow about a career that has taken in many destinations and that has seen sights few us can imagine. Here are a few selected highlights from a great interview.
On swapping Toronto for Ukraine and a medical that you cannot fail:
Literally as I landed on the ground at Kansas, I got a message saying the deal had been done with Metalurh, so I flew back to Toronto and straight on to Munich and then on to Donetsk. All in all I flew for about 24 hours, so getting off the plane, as you can imagine, I wasn’t in the best of nick so in the medical, I had to do a heart rate test on the bike, I remember doing the bike and then after they asked me to sit for a couple of minutes so they can see how your heart recovers, next thing I know, I wake up on the floor with blood streaming down my nose, I’d fainted on the floor. They signed me anyway! I don’t know how I could ever have failed the medical because I fell off the bike”
On being held at gunpoint in Crimea:
“We were told we had to travel by bus a few days before the game because the air space was closed because of the troubles, I think it was an eight hour bus journey. Once we got down to a peninsula in Crimea, there was two boarders, a Ukrainian one which we got through in 45 minutes, literally 20 yards further there was a Russian boarder set up. So an hour passes, two hours pass and players start going off the bus to see what was going on, basically Russia had seen Crimea as part of Russia but we were travelling as part of a Ukrainian league match so they were expecting our foreign players to have Visas to enter Russia, so four hours had passed and a few of us without thinking went across the road to a toilet, or we tried to go over when four or five soldiers with balaclavas and machine guns pointed the guns at us and screamed at us to get back on the bus. Eventually even Moscow got involved and we played the game”
On Brendan Rodgers:
“He was very, very different to anything I’d experienced, he was a real players manager, you could talk to him about anything, you were so comfortable around him, I would talk to him about improving, or watch clips of old games or even talk about my personal life and I’d feel like I was getting special treatment, but he was doing it with every player and every player felt like that”
It really is a fascinating chat that is well worth your time. It's available here.
