Mr Wrong still getting it right

In his Ranelagh home, Eamon Dunphy is immersed in work on his autobiography. Chuckling, he confides he plans to call it Wrong About Everything, the perfect title, he reckons, for heading his critics off at the pass. He rises at 5am every day to begin the work, a revelation which will surprise those who would find it much easier to imagine Eamon Dunphy rolling into rather than out of bed at that hour of the morning.

After all, here is a legendary Dublin night-owl who once turned up so tired and emotional in the RTÉ studios during the 2002 World Cup that he had to be hauled off air.

But Dunphy, who will turn 67 in August, says he’s a changed man. After a couple of health setbacks — including a fatigue-inducing virus which dogged him for three years — he decided it was time to take better care of himself.

“I use an exercise bike upstairs, I’ve cut down dramatically on the cigarettes, I’ve cut back lifestyle-wise and so all of that stuff stopped,” he says. “I feel great and my energy levels are brilliant now so any rumours about my demise are premature.”

He says he is pouring heart and soul into this book about his life and times. The word count is currently running at 63,000 — “and I’m only leaving Millwall”, he laughs. But for the next three weeks the magnum opus will have to take a back seat as Dunphy once again shares the lead roles with John Giles, Liam Brady and Bill O’Herlihy in RTÉ’s coverage of Euro 2012.

The Montrose first-teamers have long been recognised as not only the best football analysts in the business but also purveyors of the most compulsively watchable live television seen in this country since the Late Late with Gaybo was in its prime.

The origin of the experiment was humble enough, Dunphy debuting on our screens for the 1978 World Cup in Argentina. It was another eight years before John Giles came on board and, with the pair immediately hooking up to good effect for the World Cup in Mexico in 1986, the road ahead seemed full of promise.

Except that Dunphy bailed out even before the final, incensed by a send-up of the duo performed in studio by the late Dermot Morgan. And he would stay away for Euro ’88 too, only returning in time for a reputation-defining Italia ’90.

“For the third-place match in ’86 they brought Dermot in and he ripped the piss royally out of me and John,” Dunphy recalls. “And I went apeshit and refused to do the final, even though the director general rang me up on the morning of the game. And I didn’t back down. Was I wrong? No. The very thing we were trying to do was to get away from the cliches and the banalities and the people who couldn’t speak English, and Dermot had done this caricature of exactly that.”

So, all these years later, what then does he make of Morgan’s heirs, ‘Apres Match’?

“I love it. Funnily enough, John doesn’t. He walks out of the studio. The thing with Dermot was not that I minded being parodied — what I minded was the idea that we were muppets who couldn’t string two words together.”

And, he laments, there are still too many muppets infesting coverage of football on the box.

“Some of it is awful stuff,” he says. “I think these television corporations see their customers, the viewers, as couch potatoes with a can of beer in their hand who can’t digest intelligent or rigorous analysis, who don’t want to see their heroes attacked.”

But he thinks he has spotted a few encouraging lights in the studio darkness.

“Danny Murphy and Jamie Carragher are really bright guys who will do well if they give them a chance. Gary Neville is interesting and good but his coaching job with England is an impossible conflict of interests. That’s why when Liam [Brady] started working with [Giovanni] Trapattoni he immediately gave up RTÉ. [Graeme] Souness is good. He loved working in RTÉ and I think he’s better for that experience. He’s much more inclined to challenge things. We’ve had our moments, yes, but I like Graeme. Although I don’t like him as much as Graeme likes himself (laughs)”.

Dunphy’s ‘moments’, whether with fellow panellists, players, managers or other media personnel, are all part of the legend, including celebrated judgement calls on the likes of [Michel] Platini (“a fairy”) Cristiano Ronaldo (“a puffball”) and, most recently, [Sergio] Aguero (“a one-trick pony”). However, he wants to set the record straight on one quote which is frequently attributed to him on the internet. “I never said that Mick McCarthy was a boil on the arse of humanity,” he clarifies.

But the Dunphy fireworks can sometimes blow up in his face with altogether more serious consequences. His outburst of indignation after Ireland’s scoreless draw with Egypt at Italia ’90 led to him being widely misquoted as saying that he was ashamed to be Irish. There was also physical retaliation, when his car was rocked by a mob in what he calls “a shocking incident” at Dublin airport. But more disturbing still was the impact that Dunphy’s perceived Public Enemy No 1 status had on his family that summer.

“When my kids ran out on the street after the Holland match — and they were only nippers, my son in particular — the other kids chased them back into the house. That was pretty gruesome. But they survived. As did I. As you know, people thought I was being a ‘controversialist’. People thought I was doing it for a lark. I wasn’t. I was dead serious.”

And then there was the notorious Rod Liddle incident. This was the occasion when, in responding to a piece by The Sunday Times columnist in which he’d referred to Roy Keane as a thug, Dunphy alleged live on air that Liddle had left his wife to run off with a younger woman.

“Oh, I do regret that,” he says. “That was an appalling thing to say. And I apologised to him when we spoke on the Joe Duffy Show the next day. But if you consider that I’ve been doing this since 1978, there haven’t been too many Rod Liddle moments. And you do have to be careful that you don’t get into caricature. The biggest danger would be that you’d start trying to create moments like that. Okay, my thing is to be opinionated but show me someone who loves sport who isn’t opinionated.”

Where Dunphy has tended to create real problems, for himself and others, is when his arguments turn personal. Probably the best known example was when his passionate but sometimes belligerent defence of Keane at the time of Saipan led to his friendship with Giles breaking down for a period of time. “The aggression came from me,” he accepts. “I called him and Liam ‘Uncle Toms’ on Questions and Answers.”

The resounding irony, of course, is that the man who was once Keane’s greatest public defender is now a trenchant critic of the player and manager turned pundit, Dunphy recently branding the man whose life story he wrote as “a bore” and “a pain in the arse”. So where did it all go wrong?

“I liked him enormously when we were doing the book but then I had to go back to the day job,” he says. “And he was manager of Sunderland and maybe I was critical of things, like the fact that he wasn’t living there. All of a sudden I get a phone call from [Keane’s advisor] Michael Kennedy, ‘I thought we were friends?’. And I said, ‘Look, I’ve got a job, Michael. We had a deal for the book but I can’t go on being your PR man’. I wouldn’t pull my punches to stay with anybody.”

For all that, Dunphy says he encouraged RTÉ to try to get Keane to join the Montrose panel and, further, maintains that he would have no problem working with him if a deal was ever done.

“What would he bring to the table is the question. Certainly, he’s charismatic, he’s clever, the grey matter is there. I would certainly work with him. I wrote some savage stuff about Liam [Brady] during the Eoin Hand regime and when Liam was coming to RTÉ I had no problem with it. I’m not a personally aggressive person. I’m actually a messer. We get on brilliantly now and we’re really very good friends, thank God.

“So if Roy Keane came in and did his stuff and added to the mix and made it more entertaining and enlightening for the audience — which I think is the only criterion that really matters — I’d be delighted. But I’d have my doubts because I’ve seen him on ITV and I don’t think he’s very good.”

With that exercise bike upstairs, Eamon Dunphy might be a changed — not to say changeable — man. But changed should not be confused with mellowed.

“I haven’t found a niche and gone to sleep,” he declares. “I’m still angry and still passionate.”