Alan Quinlan Usual Suspects story sums up Anthony Foley’s wicked sense of humour

When news broke of Anthony Foley’s tragic passing, on Sunday afternoon, Alan Quinlan was in the Sky Sports studio watching Ulster vs. Bordeaux.

One wondered if the former Munster and Ireland flanker would be in studio when the game reached half-time. By the time the ad break was over, Quinlan was already on his way home.

In today’s Irish Independent, Quinlan writes poignantly about his former Shannon, Munster and Ireland teammate. He describes Foley thus – ‘A brilliant dad. A loving husband. The most loyal of friends. The kindest of brothers. A special son.’

As a close friend of Foley, Quinlan feels he would want everybody to ‘smile and remember the good times’.

So that is what Quinlan does in his column. Attempting to capture the essence of ‘Axel’, he tells a tale about an away trip to Ulster with the Shannon RFC lads. The following anecdote comes with a spolier alert:

‘Anthony watched as we all got engrossed in The Usual Suspects, a film that had just been released in the cinema, but which, somehow, we’d managed to get an illegal copy of.

‘So we watched Gabriel Byrne and Kevin Spacey and the plot unfold – an hour or so in – just when he noticed the silence all around him, the quiet fascination with what we were watching on the screen, he perked up. “The man with the limp is Keyser Söze,” Anthony said, deliberate in his timing, knowing the reaction he’d get.

‘That was Axel, he just couldn’t help himself. That he had ruined the movie for the whole lot of us was the sort of thing that would have made him laugh.’

The full Quinlan column is definitely worth a read and gives a taste of a man that was fully committed to Munster, his family and friends.

Meanwhile, there is no update yet as to whether Munster’s Champions Cup game against Glasgow Warriors will go ahead on Saturday as planned. Munster director of rugby Rassie Erasmus will address the media on Wednesday afternoon and a decision may well have been made by then.

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