RTÉ tip fedora to Big Mal
The suited have outshone the booted. Brolly and O’Hara — fancy dan and permatan — have stolen the show. Shooting from the hip has proven the best route to overcoming the blanket defence.
Not everyone is thrilled with this state of affairs, notably Paul Grimley and Kevin Walsh. And the national broadcaster may soon find itself heeding Gary Lineker’s words last year, when he reasoned it was impossible for Match of the Day to ape RTÉ’s controversial approach to football punditry, because players and managers simply wouldn’t talk to them anymore.
Whether it would be wise for our TV chiefs to apply the muzzle in order to future-proof its supply of ‘we-expected-a-hard-game-and-that’s-exactly-what-we-got’ sound bites is another matter.
Because judging by the prominence your Dunphys, Hooks and Spillanes — if I may pluralise in the way beloved of their trade — enjoy at the apex of Irish life, our fascination with sports punditry might actually go deeper than our interest in the sports themselves.
How is it so? Like most of its stars, the talking game, as we now know it, has reached middle age.
ITV was the pioneer and straight away it devised a ratings winner when Malcolm Allison, Derek Dougan, Bob McNab and, yes, Paddy Crerand disagreed, shouted, ranted and — in McNab’s case — listened politely through the 1970 World Cup.
As BBC were beaten for the only time, that first panel’s success was famously attributed to producer John Bromley, who confined the quartet to a nearby hotel for the duration of the tournament, entrusted them with the keys to their mini-bars and woke them each morning with a bottle of champagne.
Looseners for the cannons. Yet, somehow, the results were fresh and controversial rather than tired and emotional.
The cigar-sucking Allison was the star turn, making back pages for his insistence that Alan Mullery wasn’t fit to play for England and, less palatably, front ones for dismissing Romanians and Russians as peasants.
That golden infancy of punditry extended well into the ’70s, with Brian Clough already branding goalkeepers clowns at a time when the man who would later embroider his act over here was still dividing the Cold Blow Lane faithful.
But gradually — across the water, at least — the genre found its way from there to Jamie Redknapp and Alan Shearer. Literally, as the former might have it, a plunge from a top, top mountain into a slough of cheerleading and stating the obvious.
Ever so well, Gary.
The natural sanitisation scrubbed up by political correctness played its part, but punditry also morphed into a promotional tool for the product it pronounced judgment on.
A bought jury. The nadir was probably reached towards the end of the last decade, around the time Roy Keane likened the whole business to being trapped in a dentist’s chair.
“You’re sitting there with people like Richard Keys and they’re trying to sell something that’s not there.”
The Irish journey, however, has been nearly the reverse — in almost all our codes, but particularly in GAA, where we have travelled from the diligent sobriety of Enda Colleran and Liz Howard into the garrulous bear-pit that now pours colourful scorn on just about every Gaelic football match.
Most of RTÉ’s punditry work is a throwback to that first, Samba-themed party — a brakeless vehicle for hard-hitting, grandstanding, entrenched positions and outlandish imagery.
There is no suggestion somebody in Montrose is bolt holing them in the Burlo with Bollinger, but whatever the fuel, it produced ‘puke football’ and many comparable epithets.
Of course, the party-plan is tweaked slightly to suit the individual sports. Horses for courses.
Soccer is a bawdy, barstool affair, Dunphy shushing the crowd for another ballad, a lament for bygone days. Sing it, John.
Rugby operates along similarly cartoonish lines, with, as you might expect, an added frisson of exclusivity.
The hurlers might be the exception; a rare protected breed. These are the great evangelists.
Hosts of an exhibition with no shortage of wine and cheese — roaring admiration over one another; nuts to a monkey, as such. Still taking their cue from Loughnane’s genuine belief that every game is The. Single. Greatest. Game. Of. Hurling. We. Have. Ever. Seen.
In sharp contrast; poor, downtrodden Gaelic — the sport with the lowest self-esteem — is perennially drenched in shame and vitriol. Every game, nay each handpass, is an existential crisis. Contrary men compete to deliver the finest putdowns. Just this weekend, Pat Spillane suggested Limerick’s version of the blanket was woven, to a poor standard, in an Asian sweatshop.
If they are trying to sell us something, it is out of a car boot.
Which is why I couldn’t quite understand the fuss about O’Hara’s outburst last week. Sure, there was a hint of opportunist score-settling, but football nights in the RTÉ saloon have seen plenty of cheaper shots over the years.
Of course, RTÉ must be mindful that we have recently slipped into a new age of punditry, where Keys has been extracted and Roy sits down for his fillings.
They decided, across the water, that if they cannot go back to the days of Big Mal, they can do a little better than ‘he’ll be disappointed with that.’ The likes of Gary Neville have lifted, rather than hit, the bar.
And RTÉ have already adapted. In hurling, the appointment of Donal Óg Cusack, you feel, is a nod towards forensics. Likewise, Shane Horgan’s promotion in rugby. Eamo, as he never tired of telling us, even watched the German Cup quarter-final.
This evening he might even watch the final.
If I haven’t said it 200 times on this page, I haven’t said it once; the rise of squash is long overdue.
And so, here it is, on the cusp of the Olympics, just wrestling and the baseball-softball alliance blocking its 2020 vision.
I’ve backed the wrestlers before. Sure, theirs is not a business for zealous guardians of personal space. Or maybe it is. But there is a noble, primitive fairness about it, a reliance on technique and strength and an acceptance that the best man usually wins.
But there is something special about a man or woman who masters walls, massages their implacability to create angles for their own use. And I’ve always been impressed with squash’s thoroughly complicated let/stroke rule.
Forget your claims of ‘contact’, so ubiquitous in modern penalty areas. These cases of obstruction are altogether harder to prove.
Was the obstructed making every effort to reach the ball? Did he create the interference? Did the obstructer do his best to avoid interference? Did the interference prevent a reasonable swing? And on it goes, reams of legislation to ensure men will not seek an easy way out and pass up their responsibility to play the ball.
For that alone, squash deserves its day in the sun. Its referees anyway.
Mark Hughes, above: Even his old lookalike Ailsa Stewart – who overcame death to return to Summer Bay – didn’t have Sparky’s bouncebackability.
Eric Abidal: Dignified acceptance that sentiment will play no part in top-level sport. His battling quality will surely be in demand.
Bolton Wanderers: Quickquid? Football shirts were never more expensive, yet never cheaper. Guess, for an industry that’s priced out families, payday loan firms are a natural bedfellow.
Eddie McGuire: An unusual approach by the Collingwood president to defusing a racist tirade by a 13-year-old girl at indigenous player Adam Goodes – he went on radio and suggested Goodes would be good choice to promote the new musical King Kong. “You know with the ape thing.”
