Willo Flood recalls day he was burgled by fan

Dubliner Willo Flood has given an uproarious account of a confrontation with a burglar at his home back when, as a 19-year-old, he had just broken through at Manchester City.

The Dundee United midfielder, now 31, admits it was a “traumatic” experience but the passing of the years has clearly allowed him to see the funny side of it.

In a BBC interview, Flood explains he had only recently moved into a new house in Manchester at the time and had yet to buy much in the way of furniture when, one night as he was sitting on a bean bag watching his brand new plasma TV, the security light went off out back.

Taking up the story, he says: “I was thinking: ‘What was that? It must be a cat’.

“And two minutes later a boy walks in with a big knife. And it wasn’t his own knife; it was a knife he took from my kitchen (laughs).

“I just jumped up and I was like: ‘I’m going to run at him’ and then I thought: ‘Nah, nah, don’t be doing that, Willo’.

“So he goes: ‘Get that telly off the wall’. I was like: ‘What?’

‘Get that telly off the wall, NOW’. I was like: ‘Alright, calm down, calm down’.

“Then in the middle of it, he goes: ‘Oh…you’re Willo Flood’. I was like: ‘Yeah, yeah’.

“And he goes: ‘’Don’t take this personal mate, this is nothing personal — I’m a big City fan’. I was like: ‘Aw, cheers, yeah’.

“I ended up getting a screwdriver out and getting the plasma off the wall. The plasma took two days to get up, one minute to get off (laughs).

“I remember carrying it out, and the knife was to the back of me.”

While Flood was taking the first available chance to flee to a neighbour’s house for help, the burglar was stealing his car and making his getaway with the television as well as some money and valuables.

Within a few minutes of being alerted to what had happened, Manchester City had sent people around to Flood’s house to look after him.

When the interviewer puts it to Flood that it was adding insult to injury for the burglar to make him carry his own television out of the house, he responds, “It’s not great, is it? And people were like: ‘You should have just hit him’. But what if you got stabbed for the sake of a bit of insurance money? There’s no point. At the time it was a very traumatic experience but you become stronger after it.”