Supporters’ Awards Scandal

The UCD Supporters’ Awards have been sensationally sabotaged, we can exclusively (’cos no-one else cares) reveal. Early on in the voting process, a suspicious trend emerged whereby random people we’d never heard of submitted only one vote – for a nominee in the New Player of the Year category. For his own safety, he shall remain anonymous. Let’s just say that his name rhymes with “Mark Rooney”. Our first such vote was received by someone whose name came up in our inbox as “roond” – which we took to be the person in question himself. Interestingly, this person’s vote for Match of the Season went to UCD v. Cork – the only game in which our mysterious protagonist scored! Such circumstantial evidence proved him, in our eyes at least, completely and utterly guilty. However, more damning evidence was to come with our fourth saboteur – someone (a girl, which explains a lot…) who said that she had “attended most of the matches this year and he is a excellent (sic) player.”.

Things took a turn for curiouser when we started to receive a catalogue of emails, all of which voted for this player as New Player of the Year (and in some cases as Player of the Year!) and which all failed to vote in any other category with e-mails ending in @courts.ie. And finally, it happened – someone let the whole game down. Some clever-clogs, instead of forwarding their “nomination”, forwarded the very email which was doing the rounds amongst the player’s mummy’s friends! Note that it was the player’s mummy’s friends who were behind this – not his own friends! Make of that what you will... The e-mail read (all in capitals for some reason) “Hi [name withheld to protect the person’s shame]. Could you do me a favour. *ark has been nominated for the New Best Player of the Year with UCD along with another lad. Naturally, the more votes he gets, the better. So could you and a few of your workmates e-mail a vote for him to the address below. Just say you wish to vote for Mark R*oney as the New Best Player of the Year. E-mail address is: ucdafc@yahoo.ie. Thanks [name eile]”. When we e-mailed Mar* about this, we got back 419 e-mails denying any knowledge.

After considering his punishment, STIG decided that we should present him with the award anyway. Why? Well, there were a number of reasons. First, he made the intelligent move of voting for Mick O’Donnell as his Player of the Year, which won him a lot of favour amongst the large and hardcore Micko Appreciation Society contingent on the Supporters’ Committee. Secondly, he had actually won the award anyway. And thirdly, anyone who cares enough about an unofficial Supporters’ Award that he could actually be bothered to get his mum to rig it deserves some show of appreciation!

This article has been forwarded to all those who partook in this scam. Hopefully they’ll see the funny side just as we did! However, rest assured that STIG will not be forgetting this for a while, and that more comment will follow in future issues. Indeed, the only person to have gained from this is Pat Burke, whose open-goal miss in Drogheda last season now officially ceases to be STIG’s main source of slagging!

This article originally appeared in print in STIG Volume III, Issue IX