Larry Ryan: Roy Keane is the only man to fill holes in the internet
We’ll be scouring the Other Channels for his contributions this tournament, on ITV. Though at least he has been set free from his role as a comic turn in the Micah and Roy show
On the eve of the Euros, word arrived of a setback: the famous Killian M2 archive has been taken down from YouTube. Killian broke the news on Twitter, to an outpouring of distress. Copyright holders had triggered the removal of the entire treasure trove — 6,000 clips from old, largely Irish, TV shows, uploaded mainly from VHS tapes.
Bits of — nuggets from simpler times.
It wasn’t the TV channels that objected, Killian told us: “RTÉ Archives, to be fair, had been brilliant in the last few years, I think they got to appreciate what I was trying to do.”
No wonder, when Killian’s stockpile had sometimes been RTÉ’s best bet of finding one of its own clips to reshow, given the patchiness of their own archive.
And in the main, the regular shots of nostalgia he pumped into our bloodstreams can only have been good for RTÉ, generating warmth for its contributions to our childhoods and beyond.
Central to that was the steady supply of clips from major football tournaments, vignettes of ‘the panel’ doing its stuff — chucking pens, stopping it there, scribbling maniacally on the screen, drawing wild conclusions, and often declaring soccer and its practitioners bankrupt.
And central to that was Eamon Dunphy. This cruel cull has left craters everywhere you look around the internet, gaping holes at the heart of thousands of articles built around videos of Eamo going large, bringing it to the cods and spoofers and Bengal lancers, doubting certain football managers’ suitability to even drive the train to Cork.
Overnight, it’s all ‘content not found’, a poignant signpost of the times. Because it’s the kind of content that won’t be found over the next month either.
That’s not the end of the world. These heady hours, on the opening weekend of a big tournament — with a month of untold possibility stretching before us — are still among the finest of our lives.
At these moments we are untethered from the fixed narratives that box in the rest of our sporting year. We are set free, ready to ride wherever the dark horses take us.
Three games today to settle us nicely into the rhythms. Gentle looseners, then a chance to run the rule over the Belgians, to adjudicate if they are, as the lads would once have put it, among ‘the real teams’.
Remember too, the kids, for whom this might well become the greatest Euros. The plague that has shunted the whole event back a year has also delivered them a unique blessing — the shifting seasons mean many of them will be playing actual football matches during a tournament for the first time. A chance to copy heroics beyond the back garden or front green. To emboss these memories.
And then, briskly, we’re down to serious business on Sunday, with England, when our maturation as a nation is invariably up for grabs.
That’s when we miss them most, the lads. Because no degree of maturity could prevent you missing Billo’s old chuckle in the moments after it has all gone wrong again.
“That was a shambles by England, wasn’t it gentlemen... ”
“A shambles, Bill.”
By Monday or Tuesday, in the olden days, we’d be ready for the first proper state of the union debate. Probably after France-Germany throws up a stinker.
The various cancers on the sport. The plight of the little guy on the street. The scourge of PlayStations and personal stereos and third-level education. The lack of real teams. The malign role of the academy system in ensuring there are no great players out there.
Maybe this time they should devote a half-hour instead to debating what kind of academies should be put in place to produce another Dunphy.
In his latest gig promoting a bookie, Eamo has not been registering his approval of RTÉ’s current punditry performance, calling it embarrassing and an insult.
A touch unfair on the current incumbents because Eamo has, of course, ruined punditry for everyone. There is no way that sensible people saying reasonable things can compete with a man who never pundited with the handbrake on. Who never let his opinions be hamstrung by a vague nagging sense he might once have held a directly contradictory view. Who never let facts stand in the way of the search for a wider truth.
That said, there was immense promise in an excruciating protracted standoff between Peter Collins and Richie Sadlier during Ireland-Andorra. If an inability to predict where this is going was the hallmark of the great RTÉ nights, these were green shoots.
The first job, for anyone rebuilding a golden archive, is to get that one online.
But in truth, those great communal nights of yore, taking everything on its merits, are probably behind us for good, no matter who’s holding court. Our viewing habits are too fractured. Our pundits are being fact-checked live into safe spaces by social media.
Those shots that came in from the Iveagh Gardens the other night, of that first concert back, punters rocking out gently from the social distance of their pods, brought to mind RTÉ’s task now. It’s a different kind of gig, sanitised, and James Vincent McMorrow is no Eamon Dunphy either, baby.
The game-changer, the rock and roll star, would, of course, be Roy, if he was coaxed home.
We’ll be scouring the Other Channels for his contributions this tournament, on ITV. Though at least he has been set free from his role as a comic turn in the Micah and Roy show.
As box office as he still is, over there, how much better could Roy the pundit be back home, the gloves off, free of the pantomime version of himself? Everything cutting a little closer to the bone.
The version Eamo once ghostwrote. ‘The ball was there, I think, take that you ****.’
Those gaping holes on the internet would be filled by the end of the month.
