Paul Rouse: One last thing... Pat Spillane and the changing face of punditry
What is abundantly clear in the case of Pat Spillane is that his forthright views on Gaelic football were never designed to curry favour. His view of the game and how it should be played (forged and lent credibility by winning eight All-Ireland medals) led to massive controversies over the years.
In the 30 years that Pat Spillane has worked on The Sunday Game, punditry has changed dramatically. Some of the forces that have shaped that change are specific to the GAA, some are related to sport in general, and others are rooted in wider social and cultural change.
From just a handful of pundits working at occasional matches 30 years, there is now a small battalion of professional pundits working against the backdrop of the polyphonic tumult of the Internet.
Here are some of the forces that have changed punditry over the last three decades:
The single most important change in punditry over the past 30 years is the scale of sport now available to television viewers. When Pat Spillane retired from inter-county football in 1991 and subsequently joined The Sunday Game as an analyst, there were just a handful of GAA matches shown live in any given year.
The expansion of live television coverage of Gaelic games in the 1990s was part of a global change. The fact that Ireland is not just a television market in itself but was de facto part of the British television market was crucial. The launch of the Premier League in 1991 and its partnership with Sky Sports had an inevitable impact on Irish sport and Irish television.
The broadcast of an increased number of Gaelic games live on television in the mid-1990s was both a response to this new context and was shaped by it.
Buying the broadcast rights to sports is one thing for channels who have sporting content as just one part of their offering, but it is altogether another for subscription channels dedicated to sport.
Over the past 30 years, the proliferation of broadcasters and the manner in which live content is dispersed across multiple channels on subscription television puts a premium on finding ways to extend the attraction of live sport beyond the starting and finishing whistles.
Accordingly, if a match starts at 8pm, programming might start at 7pm. This has the virtue of potentially drawing viewers earlier, with the obvious opportunity to sell more advertisements at a higher value.
The value to Sky Sports of Jamie Carragher and Gary Neville is related to their double-act on Monday Night Football as personalities, and not just match pundits. Their analysis – mixed with the manner in which they dig at each other – is a classic example of the creation of programming which transcends interest in the actual match itself.
This is an approach to sports broadcasting that is lifted wholesale from America, where the rise of ESPN since the late 1970s set down a template which has been remade around the world.
It is not all talk now, however. Thirty years ago the number of cameras at matches was limited and the technology of punditry essentially stopped at the use of action replays in slow motion.
The use of touchscreens, the capacity to draw on screens, the ability to use multiple perspectives and much else has facilitated the possibility of showing viewers things, as well as just talking about them.
In respect of Pat Spillane, his contribution has been in his words; the technological pieces of other pundits are not his forté.
The strategic challenge for a sports organisation is how does it position its sport on screens, be they televisions, tablets or phones. This is a calculation that demands consideration of revenue generation, encouraging participation, and helping to generate alternate income, not least through providing a platform for sponsors.
And part of answering that question is also a consideration of the extent to which a pundit can be allowed to be critical of a match, of a sport, and of a sports organisation and the people who run it.
The broadcast of sport has entered a new era over the past five years. The market is rapidly evolving and the possibilities created by technological change has led to an increasing diversification of sports broadcasting. This is evident across every significant sport and is evidenced by the manner in which sport can now be found on streaming services (such as Amazon Prime), on the websites of newspapers (such as the ‘Irish Examiner’) and on apps run by sports organisations themselves (such as NFL Game Pass) or dedicated to particular sports organisations (such as GAAGO).
This, too, has an impact on the nature of punditry. In particular, in what way are pundits influenced by the ‘partnership’ between the governing body of the sport and the broadcaster – whether on television or on the internet?
What is abundantly clear in the case of Pat Spillane is that his forthright views on Gaelic football were never designed to curry favour. His view of the game and how it should be played (forged and lent credibility by winning eight All-Ireland medals) led to massive controversies over the years.
For example, when Donegal’s defensive approach to playing Dublin in the 2012 All-Ireland Final was such that he said they “should be tried for crimes against Gaelic Football… Gaelic football as Donegal wanted to reduce it to would degenerate it into a shambles”.
This was just one of a series of interventions that mean he could never be charged with being a cheerleader for his sport.
The manner in which players and managers now say either nothing at all or nothing of interest, places a different emphasis on the words of a pundit. Nothing can match the plain-talking experience of a person who was actually participating in a contest, but in the almost complete absence of meaningful access now in Gaelic games, post-match analysis of pundits is the draw. It seems impossible to imagine now, but in the 1980s RTÉ cameras and reporters (most brilliantly, Mick Dunne) were in winning dressing rooms after All-Ireland finals. The footage that came from those rooms and the words of the players were raw and fascinating. There is no prospect of a return to such access; the pundit has unchallenged attention.
It is fascinating (in a grim way) to imagine what the social media reaction to Pat Spillane’s denigration of Tyrone’s “puke football” might be like today. It is a reminder, of course, in this new age of insult, there are pundits who themselves have used their position, in turn, to say outrageous, insulting, derogatory things that they pass off as entertainment. To be fair to Pat Spillane, his use of the phrase was a one-off and – albeit a long time later – he apologised for it. And it is mild compared to some of insults and worse that have been thrown his own way.
What is clear that over the past 30 years, the boundaries of acceptability have shifted and seem set to shift further.
The internet is reordering the way we live in all aspects of our lives. A fundamental aspect of this reordering is the related ubiquity of smart phones and social media. It is worth remembering that the smart phone is little more than a decade old but its impact on our world is already profound.
To put this in context, 19 out of every 20 people on the island has a smartphone. This facilitates the fact that there are around 4 million people here who use social media on a regular basis.
When you add to that the extent of interconnectedness with the Irish diaspora who have access to seeing matches and commenting on them, it all translates into a vast commentariat on GAA. The upside of this is the shared information and shared fun which is the very best of social media.
This democratisation of punditry extends to comments on the pundits themselves and can be fair. There can be no expectation from a paid pundit that they should be liked or agreed with.
But far too much comment strays well beyond the boundaries of fair criticism. It’s fine to expect a thick skin, but only a truly unusual person would remain unaffected by the brutality on view from some of the cowards and fools wandering (often anonymously) around the internet.
Apparently, many people are unable to accept that someone having a different opinion to them does not automatically make them corrupt or appalling or just an arsehole.
To imagine that this does not affect a pundit is not realistic. Pat Spillane referenced this in a recent column in ‘The Sunday World’: “Unless one experiences the bile these keyboard warriors spew out on social media platforms, it is difficult to explain its impact. I would regard myself as thick-skinned. But I would have to admit that the anonymous critics, who probably made up less than one per cent of those who write on social media platforms, had started to get to me this year for the first time ever.”
Pat Spillane has enriched enjoyment of Gaelic football on RTÉ during his time as a pundit. Sometimes he was right, sometimes he was wrong. But, in the way of these things, the times that I thought he was right might very well be the times that you thought he was wrong.
His importance is undeniable. He has been a major presence – central to debate on Gaelic football – as the game and its broadcast has changed and changed again over three decades. And he will be missed.
