Considering who was visiting the Phoenix Park last Saturday and the level of security about the place, it wasn’t the ideal location for a football match. Lusk United’s under-15 team wondered if they’d be able to make their game at all.
They arrived much earlier than usual, just to be on the safe side, and if seeing is believing, the image they posted on their Facebook and Instagram pages showed them bumping in to you-know-who and being given a team talk by the fella.
We saw them listening intently to the leader of the free world who, one Facebook commenter suggested, was telling them: “You guys need to play those under-lapping full-backs high up the field and invert the wingers at the same time. Let the number 10 drop deep and then your number nine should essentially become a number eight, which allows the number six to sneak into the centre-forward position without the opposition having a clue what’s going on.”
There was, largely, a warm response from those who viewed the photo and accompanying post. “That’s lovely to see,” said one. “It’s like the time the primary school children in Clare met him when he was on his golf course. He was very nice to them. My opinion of him has changed after seeing this latest encounter.”
“I have to say I thinks that’s class!! All politics aside,” said another, “the president of the United States had a chat with the lads!” Another, alas, chose to stir the north Dublin nest: “Make Lusk Great Again” . . . there’s no Rush.”
Others were a little rude – “At least he’d get their red cards overturned” and “Trump’s ankles aren’t that slim” – before Lusk came clean.
“Obviously, none of it was real,” wrote the club’s PR person Mary McClorey. “It was simply an AI-generated picture made purely for a laugh. Except it grew wings and travelled.”
It did too – more than one million people saw the photo. One million! No flies on Lusk, they saw an opportunity. They had, said McClorey, been fundraising for years for an astro pitch at the club, so “the boys came up with an idea: what if everyone who saw the post gave a couple of dollars towards the astro? We laughed about it, but then thought, ‘actually, why not?’.
“So, to all the people in America and around the world who saw our post, laughed, shared it, we are asking you to help us turn the madness into something real with the boys’ fundraiser idea. We are not asking for a fortune. Just a couple of euro, pounds or dollars, if you can spare it. What started as a silly AI picture could actually help us get one step closer to building something real for our young players.”
How generous have people been thus far? Not very. Lusk’s target is €500,000 – by Tuesday afternoon, just €382 had been contributed. Lousers.
Perhaps people were feeling peeved about the use of AI and the recent concerns expressed about the direction this lark is heading. But as the Trump man emoted on his Truth Social thingy on Monday: “the only control or ‘guardrails’ that AI needs is a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT, and the U.S.A. has that, in spades!”
All Lusk need is an astro pitch, so, go on, donate here in spades.