I met Rio Ferdinand and other Manchester United players!

Posted on Jul 18, 2009 in Events | 7 comments

Ah, doesn’t my post title say it all? Heh But it’s, oh so true! My friends who are on my Facebook have already seen the picture but I thought I should share them here to … well, show off.

After all, how often does one get to meet Manchester United players?

The four players who showed up at the Nike 5 Challenge – a five-on-five futsal tournament where the winning team gets to kick about with the Manchester United players – were (from left to right) Darren Fletcher, Darron Gibson, Rio Ferdinand and Nani. My favourite player, Gary Neville, was at a different press conference at the same time. The picture below was taken after the press conference and interviews, when the players took on the winning team. It ended with a draw.

Ia and I, who were both covering the event (Ian would do the interview, I would Twitter live for R.AGE) got there pretty early. We were afraid that there would be a traffic jam as it was during Friday prayers time, and there is a mosque right next to the event venue – at the KLCC open-air carpark.

So we had time to camwhore, as you can see from the picture above. Then we just hung around there and caught up with some people I knew including Adam Carruthers, Ben Ibrahim, Mynjayz, Mojosh, Karr Wei and the nice folks from Nike including Mena and Andrew.

Then the press conference happened, and after that, Ian and I were treated to an exclusive one-on-one interview with Rio Ferdinand! No shit! I was so excited, but kept calm as I Twitterred some of his responses. The biggest thing for me, of course was him looking at me as I introduced myself and said that he liked my shirt and then turned to the Nike folks and asked if he could get one as well. Woot! Of course, after the interview (look out for the story in R.AGE on Monday), we asked him for a picture.

We hung around for a bit to try to get pictures with Darren Fletcher but he was too busy being interviewed so we didn’t get that. We managed to interrupt Darron Gibson’s conversation with some mat salleh guy (who didn’t look too happy at being cut off), and then later with Nani when he came into the room and stood around waiting for the rest of the interviews to end.

I also blogged for R.AGE about the experience, and you can read it here.

12.05pm Malaysian time (+8 GMT)