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17th August 2019
11:18am BST

"They get paid before they achieve anything. In rugby, you'll not give a guy a big contract based on potential. He'll have to perform for the senior team in order to get that money. In Arsenal they'll say, 'Oh, if we don't sign this 16-year-old kid up on a five-year deal, someone else will'."https://twitter.com/JOE_co_uk/status/1162340175315427328 One of the most memorable, and surreal, experiences was the regular football games that involved all the coaching and support staff at Arsenal. "The staff there love football, man," Flannery began. "Absolutely love it.
"They organised a couple of games and asked if I wanted to go out and play. Then you realise nobody is allowed touch Arsene Wenger. He gets the ball and you're thinking, 'How is he afforded so much time on the ball?', and it's because everyone is afraid and no-one wants to tackle him. "But I tell ya, I was just chasing shadows. I looked like such a fat idiot, running around. This was on a different level to me. Steve Bould told me, 'Stop chasing. Just hold your position'. "Then Jens Lehmann and myself got into it a little. He caught me with an elbow and split me. Yeah, he's tough. "It wasn't like he just elbowed me deliberately. He probably just saw the Irish guys running around, trying to hack people a little bit, and he probably thought, 'I'm going to give these Irish guys a bit of a taste'."One of Munster's very own and former Connacht back-row Johnny O'Connor, who was also coaching at Arsenal, sharing a pitch with the likes of Wenger, Bould, Lehmann, Robert Pires and Sol Campbell. Some going. "It was amazing," he said. "I got my eyes open to football." Eyes, and eyebrows opened.

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