The panel beater

GRAEME SOUNESS has proved as combative in the tv studio as he was in Liverpool’s midfield of the late seventies. Liam Mackey talked Dunphy, Giles, Chelsea and Man U with the man trying to buy Wolves.

Graeme Souness is chuckling as recalls the fallout from his debut as an analyst on RTÉ’s “The Premiership”.

“We went to a restaurant after the programme finished, and I managed to escape before Johnny and Eamon started singing because I was up early the following morning. And they abused me for leaving early, there and then. And then there was an abusive message from Eamon on my phone on Sunday morning for leaving early as well.”

Just how abusive?

“I could hear him singing down the phone to me.”

Yep, that sounds like the Dunph. Somehow you just can’t see this sort of thing happening with nice Beeb boys like Gavin Peacock and Garth Crooks. Souness, out of football since being sacked as boss of Newcastle a year ago, is currently building on his successful World Cup stint on RTÉ and clearly relishing the fun, as well as the games, which come with working with Ireland’s best-known sports panellists.

Not that he hadn’t encountered them before. It was in the early 70s that Souness first came in contact, literally, with Giles, back when the Scot was a precocious kid at Middlesbrough and the Irishman was a seasoned veteran with Leeds United — and clearly not about to indulge a young pretender to his crown as one of the game’s toughest and most accomplished midfielders.

“Yeah, he sorted me out,” Souness confirms. “I was just a young boy, thinking I was the toughest guy around and he put me in my place, several times. Of course, if Johnny didn’t get you, Billy Bremner did and if Billy didn’t get you, Norman Hunter was the icing on the cake. I was raw and I learned a lot from Johnny — like not to lunge in and to stay on your feet. And the realisation that I wasn’t the toughest guy ever.”

And did Souness ever play against Dunphy? The 53-year-old thinks hard, trying to recall even a fragment of a buried memory of some long ago trip to the cold, blowy Den. Or, maybe, trying to repress same. Finally, he replies: “When I was at Spurs, I may have played against him in a reserve game.”

And then adds with a grin. “You can write that, anyway.”

Joking aside, Dunphy has obviously made a positive impression on Souness.

“He’s extremely knowledgeable,” the Scot opines, “and he’s got that mischief in his make-up which makes him incredibly interesting both on camera and off. And I can understand why people would want to listen to him and hear his opinions.”

Just as people want to hear Souey’s. Already a familiar presence in the Sky Sports studio, his summer transfer to Montrose for the World Cup came about after RTÉ Sports heads were impressed by his handling of this newspaper’s Junior Sports Awards presentation ceremony in Dublin last year. (“So it’s all your fault,” he assures me).

Some eyebrows were raised at the arrival of this outsider in Bill O’Herlihy’s inner sanctum but it wasn’t long before Souness was winning over the public as well as his fellow panellists. He particularly relished, he admits, the unaccustomed freedom of speech.

“That was definitely the case in the World Cup and, being Scottish, it wasn’t hard for me to be critical of England and the way they played, it came rather easily,” he says. “I think there’s an element with the analysts in England on whatever station that — how can I be polite about this? — it’s not that they toe the party line but...”

They’re too close to the game?

“Yeah. There’s your BBC men. For me, you can watch it one Saturday, and it’s the same the next Saturday and the Saturday after that. I think Sky cover the game more extensively and if there’s someone to be criticised they’re more likely to do it. But over here, it goes to a new level (laughs). It took me about five minutes to pick the pace up here. I was thrown in at the deep end with Eamon and Johnny and Liam and it was gloves off straightaway.

And as controversial as Johnny, Liam and I were, there was always Eamon to take it to another level.”

So what, then, is the our latest pundit’s take on the state of the Premiership? Souness declines to pass comment on the cloak-and-dagger aspects of the drama at Stamford Bridge on the grounds those outside a football club can never expect to fully understand what goes on behind closed doors. And, as a veteran of playing and management at Liverpool, Sampdoria, Rangers, Galatasaray, Blackburn and Newcastle — to name but a few — the man presumably speaks from deep and hard-earned experience.

But he doesn’t hold back when it comes to citing some of the strictly footballing factors which he thinks hold the key to Chelsea’s troubles this season.

“For me, to sell Gudjohnsen was an enormous mistake,” he says. “He is underrated by many although I think people in the game know his worth. And if you are going to win the Champions’ League, don’t sell him to one of your biggest rivals, even allowing for Shevchenko coming in.

“Selling Gallas was another — for me, he’s up there with John Terry and anyone else you care to mention. In the managers’ defence, it would have taken some managing to keep Gallas happy given he wanted to play centre-back. But the worst scenario for them has happened — Carvalho injured, John Terry out and Cech only just back after a long time out.

“All those factors have come back to haunt them but, in saying all that, it’s very hard to feel sorry for Chelsea because in the history of football if ever there was a team that people would find it hard to feel sorry for it would be Chelsea, because of their buying power.”

Meantime, Souness is not at all surprised to see Manchester United back lording it over the rest.

“I don’t think it would take a football anorak to work out the one obvious difference this year is Paul Scholes is back,” he says. “He, for me, is up there with anybody in the world game. Ronaldo gets all the headlines but if I was manager of Manchester United and I had to lose either Scholes or Ronaldo for the rest of the season, it would be Ronaldo.

“Scholes is everything to United. He gets his goals, he makes them play and I think with him on the field they’re a different team completely. If there was a player of the year vote in January for me there would be only one candidate.”

Tune into RTÉ for further twists, turns, shocks and surprises.

And that’ll be just the panel.