A decade on, Dunphy still RTÉ’s master of dread

"One day it might indeed all end, but Eamo’s show will surely go on forever."

Amid all the talk this week of the great decline in football all over the world; the pining for Jim Baxter, Jimmy Johnstone and Ivor Allchurch; the fears for Ragball Rovers Scotland; the worry that the great nation of Brazil is dead and buried and not coming back; the fretting over streets unsafe for football and the coaches flogging the creativity out of every toddler with a decent first touch; there was one poignant moment as Eamon Dunphy pointed to John Giles and Liam Brady and told us to “take a look at these guys, because we won’t see anyone like them again.”

But then, if we rewind a decade to Euro 2004, we find that the dystopian wilderness in store for us was, if anything, even more stark: “If you’ve got a computer and a gameboy and all of that stuff, bammm, you ain’t gonna play. What you want is a dictatorship and lots of poverty to produce great players. Fifty years from now, there will be no Bill O’Herlihy here. This will be a basketball studio.”