Careful or joke will be on us
A bit like the new season of Homeland, controvassy is boxed into a corner now.
For years to come, newspaper men will remember the evening they got a back page splash out of the England manager telling a joke about a monkey in space, and they will surely conclude that was as good as it got in the golden era of absolute nonsense.
Like the famous anti-climax when you stand atop Everest and marvel for a moment but then wonder what next, the controvassy specialists may just have set the standards impossibly high.
Euphoric, then deflated, there must be a real danger they will just go back to writing about the football now. And that would be a shame, because the full implications of a compelling week in nonsense have yet to be felt.
If Roy Hodgson deserves respite after his tactical joke-telling proved sufficient to overcome Poland, it remains to be seen if he has the punch lines in his locker for the sterner tests that await in Brazil.
If a comedy plea to get the ball to Townsend is enough to send Roy spinning towards the race-hate mire, how many are likely to be offended once he has to improv a routine to shut down Xavi and co? The FA must move now to help Roy out. There has to be room on the plane for a bantz coach.
If Rio won’t return for Rio in a player-banterer role, we know, deep down, this will only end one way; an official World Cup role for James Corden. Which should make us all the more thankful we have our own comedy act — as Noel King called them — on retainer should we ever again reach a major finals.
It might be a slightly stale show. If the English media can find new and creative ways of wrecking their managers’ heads; we tend to rely heavily on Eamon Dunphy calling ours a shambles. And Eamon has never let us down yet.
With time of the essence, we reached that point with King rather earlier than usual. Tony O’Donoghue might have been the man caught in the crossfire when Kinger lost the rag this week, but nobody was in any doubt who the bullets were for.
At the man who, a few days earlier, called King “tactically illiterate” and, obviously, “a shambles”; while Gilesy, who regularly insists there is no such thing as tactics, supplied broad agreement. And perhaps there was also a little monkey business somewhere near the heart of this squabble.
Dermot Keely recalled, in the Irish Sun this week, ejecting Eamon from a PFAI dinner in 1986 for shouting at an FAI official at the top table. After Dunphy called him “Jim McLaughlin’s monkey”, Keely administered a box and suggested this role was “better than being John Giles’s monkey”.
The incident is covered in Dunphy’s book, where he says he was thrown out by “three prominent activists from the Chicken League”.
Kinger wasn’t among the bouncers, and Dunphy also refutes the idea his analysis of the interim manager’s work had anything to do with a run-in between the pair in their League of Ireland days.
But the disdain Dunphy — and to an extent Giles — showed King last week chimes neatly enough with a long-held contempt for the domestic league and its ambassadors — an attitude they struggled to contain during Brian Kerr’s reign.
Equally, perhaps Kinger’s fury betrays some of the jealousies on the other side of that argument.
For Dunphy, at least, scepticism about domestic football extends back to the ’60s, when he believed the FAI selection panel for Ireland internationals invariably foisted one or two unqualified home players on the senior side.
Then he and Gilesy’s League of Ireland experience at Shamrock Rovers turned sour amid gripes over local intransigence scuppering grand plans to win a European Cup.
It would be sad to think that old scores played much part in this week’s nonsense. But while there’s a growing urge to dismiss the RTÉ panel as antiquated and irrelevant; might the fact that two voices have shaped the narrative of Irish football for more than three decades say something about the way our game has stagnated in the same period? The selection committee might have dissolved, but despite three World Cups and a lot of hard work by the ‘real football people’; has much about Irish football fundamentally changed since the first Rovers revolution didn’t work out?
Back then, Giles and Dunphy complained about an inability to keep youngsters at home, difficulties in establishing an academy, little joined-up thinking with schoolboy football, politics, poor facilities, small crowds.
How many of those problems have been solved? This week we crowned League of Ireland champions who will remain as anonymous to the general public as any that have gone before them.
In the same week, the international team slumped to 60th in the Fifa rankings. We might want new jokes from our comedy duo, but we might need to focus first on not becoming a laughing stock.
