Richie O'Driscoll

Richie O'Driscoll was a businessman and the owner of O'Driscolls, a clothing company. Underworld hoped to sign a contract with them and Aidan Connor came up with the novel idea of hosting a table tennis tournament with them to break the ice and of deliberately losing as a sweetener to getting Richie's signature down on paper. The Underworld team were a mixture of good and bad players: Aidan himself, Kate Connor, Johnny Connor, Kirk Sutherland and Eva Price, but Johnny wasn't interested and when the staff saw how good a player Gary Windass was they pushed Aidan into adding him to the team, even though he wasn't a member of the staff.

Richie and his wife Julia arrived ahead of some of their staff who had missed the motorway junction and he proved to be every bit as competitive as Aidan, boasting that he would play in his suit and wouldn't break into a sweat. Kirk had been instructed to throw his match to ensure an Underworld loss but he misunderstood and managed to win, much to Aidan's annoyance. The final match of the five, with the result so far being two-all, was between Aidan and Richie but the latter proved to be the better player - just - and O'Driscolls narrowly won the tournament. Richie hadn't been fooled though and realised that he was being softened up but he ended up signing up the contract anyway.