WE’VE ALL BEEN there.
It’s Monday morning, the alarm goes off, and all you want to do is roll over for five, maybe 10, more minutes. Sure you’ll still be on time…
When you stroll into work late, and the tut-tutting starts, you’ll need to have your excuse prepped and rehearsed. Here are some tips you can borrow from our favourite sports stars.
1. Car trouble (Part I)
An old reliable, partly because anybody who has a car knows what it’s like to have one that won’t start as you’re belting it out the door to work.
Of course there’s a difference between a simple excuse like that, and the one used by Derby County footballer Andre Wisdom who claimed that his sat nav led him and his £100,000 Porsche straight into a swamp.
Wisdom called for help and somehow made it to the game before kick-off, playing down the incident as “car trouble” until the photos leaked out.
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2. Car Trouble (Part II)
If you’re looking for a nice variation on the car excuse, how about simply telling your boss that you couldn’t find it?
A few months after returning home from a spell in Spain, Jermaine Pennant was contacted by police to ask if he had left his Porsche in a train station — the “P33NNT” reg plate must have been a dead giveaway.
Not only could Pennant not remember leaving the car there, he couldn’t even remember buying it.
3. “Is that the time?”
When it comes to waking up in the morning, we’re all at the mercy of our alarm clock or phone and just one power failure away from total disaster.
If there have been no reported blackouts in your area, you could always take a leaf out of Rory McIlroy’s book and claim that you got your time zones mixed up. He famously got a bit confused between Eastern time and Central time and showed up minutes before he was due to tee-off at the 2012 Ryder Cup.
All’s well that ends well though. McIlroy won his match, Europe completed an unforgettable comeback — and he ended up with a Flava Flav style timepiece as a souvenir.
4. “I just have to wait for the plumber…”
There aren’t many bigger headaches than waking up to find that the heating is broken (shiver) or that there’s a problem with the plumbing (shudder). It’s probably best to ring work and tell them that you’ve to wait for your local handyman to come and get you sorted.
You might need a painter and decorator if you’re anything like Mario Balotelli who caused an estimated £400,000 damage to his Cheshire home when he set off fireworks in the bathroom the night before the Manchester derby in 2011.
Of course, if you use an excuse like that, you’d best perform like Balotelli — he scored twice the next day as City beat United 6-1.
5. An excuse? Just march on in!
If you have the brass neck to beat all brass necks — like one Roy Maurice Keane — you might want to try to brazen it out with your boss.
Keane was only 19-years-old and a new face in the Republic of Ireland squad when he arrived late for the team bus (somewhere between 20 and 30 minutes, depending on who’s telling the story.)
Jack Charlton was understandably livid. Keane’s response was priceless: “I didn’t ask you to wait, did I?”
Be warned: if you try this in work, we take no responsibility for the consequences.
Like they say, sometimes honesty is the best policy. Maybe you should just admit to your boss that you stayed up to watch Conor McGregor v Dennis Siver, live and exclusive from midnight tonight on BT Sport 1 and available on the Setanta Sports pack in Ireland.
