Joe Brolly and the Problem of Perspective

Joe Brolly is misunderstood. Much of this is his own fault, of course. He wants to be misunderstood. There is an impish streak in Brolly. He finds it extremely hard to resist divilment. We saw it during his playing career, when he blew kisses to the crowd after scoring a goal. We see it now again on the Sunday Game, when puts a match to a stick of dynamite and then pretends to be surprised at the resulting explosion.

Brolly’s attitude is fundamentally different to the other agents provacateurs on the RTÉ Sports payroll. Eamon Dunphy and George Hook are professional irritants. They have made such names as they have by insisting that black is white and holding firm on that belief in the face of facts or evidence.

Dunphy and Hook have to do it because, if they were to lose the punditry gig, it’s not like Google or Facebook would come running to get them to write a few yards of Java or C++. Brolly is different; Brolly is a QC. He doesn’t need the pundit gig. He does it because he likes it. He does it because there’s a part of him that craves the attention. It’s the same part that made him blow the kisses, even when he knew his corner-back was likely to take the gesture the wrong way.

Brolly is different too in his attitude to the game on which expounds. Hook and Dunphy claim to be great lovers of the game, and make much of having seen an exceptional display by a brontosaurus at stand-off half/the hole behind the front two back in old God’s time, and it’s a perpetual disappointment to both men that none of these modern Jessies can fill that brontosaurus’s admittedly enormous boots.

Brolly doesn’t really do that schtick. Brolly talks about football and he knows about football but he keeps it in its context, as only a game. As only one part of the rich tapestry of life. And Brolly’s donation of a kidney to someone he hardly knew last year is proof that Brolly does see the big picture and, in that big picture, surely walks with the angels.

Unfortunately, the big picture is problematic for the Mayo football public. Mayo can only see two things – Sam, and bleak and utter hopelessness. Nothing else. Sam they’ve seen on the telly. Bleak and utter hopelessness they live with every day.

Big picture wise, Brolly is correct. Football is only a game. But equally, Brolly can see the big picture because he was sated during his football career. Some believe the Derry team of the early 1990s should have won more than one All-Ireland but at least they did win that one All-Ireland. Joe knows what it’s like to be an All-Ireland Champion. He has that warmth to temper and add perspective to his views, to help him relax.

Mayo people know no such temperament. All they know is the Fiend. The Fiend that visits every night and whispers “if only he’d sent off McDermott … if only someone had levelled Lacey … if only this fella had done that … if only that fella had done this.” If, if, if.

Martin “Glory” Storey, hero of the Model County, was profiled on Laochra Gael some years ago. In the early ‘nineties, the Wexford hurlers couldn’t win a raffle. They lost sixteen finals in a row, between Leinster and the National League. The National Leagues, if anything, were worse, because it’s not like anybody cares who wins it. But Wexford couldn’t even manage to win a title nobody wanted, reaching a nadir in 1993 when they took Cork to two replays and still couldn’t fall over the line.

Storey was smiling as he reminisced about those finals. But Storey wasn’t smiling because he’d been talking to Joe and reading Kipling and treating triumph and disaster just the same. After those sixteen loses, Storey’s Wexford finally did win Leinster in 1996, and then went onto to win the All-Ireland.

Storey’s smile may have been partly due to bonhomie and good will to all, but your correspondent will bet Grafton Street against a two-bed apartment in Gorey that Storey’s particular smile was fueled by the presence of a little celtic cross in the dresser, on the wall or inside the hip pocket. Just like the one Joe Brolly himself has.

Without that celtic cross, would Storey have been so wry in his reminiscences? Would he have spoken so easily about all those finals? Or would his haunted and hollowed out look be like that one most Mayo men see in the mirror on the fourth Monday in September?

The people of Mayo would like to look on those twin imposters, triumph and disaster, just the same. But they really need to triumph before they can realistically compare it to the disaster they’re all too familiar with, and that hasn’t quite clicked yet. So, if their outlook seems especially gloomy, if they seem particularly irritated by Joe Brolly in a way they shouldn’t, reader, forgive them. They have no other cheek left to turn.

The Championship - Magnificent, in Spite of its Flaws

Francie Grehan surrounded by Tommy Joyce, Padraic Joyce, Alan Kerins and Ja Fallon. St Jarlath's Park, Tuam, 2001.

One of the quirks of the current football Championship structure is that, even though it takes twenty weeks to run the thing off, fully half the counties in Ireland are zapped over just two weekends.

Eight counties will rattle the dustbin on that weekend when June melts into July, and eight more bid glory a sweet adieu for another year fourteen days later. There are eleven games scheduled for that weekend of June 30^th/July 1^st – the eight Round 1 Qualifiers on Saturday, and then the second Ulster semi-final and both Leinster semis on Sunday. The Connacht Final is the grace note after the second Qualifier cull in the middle of July.

Having to keep tabs on eleven games in one weekend and nine in another is a Herculean ask of any football analyst. Thank goodness the RTÉ ones generally couldn’t bother their bottoms analysing anything. They and will merrily wing it, just like always. I believe Paddy McPlayer is playing very well for his club – isn’t that right Joe?

Of course, in between those rolling rocks of qualifier slaughter there is only one game. This year’s Munster Final sits in splendid isolation on Sunday July 8^th, even though Kerry and Cork are on the one side of the draw this year. Can most ardent of Déise, Treaty or Banner patriots, each more excellent than the last, expect anything other than one-way traffic in that one?

Nobody on any of the provincial councils has a phone number for anyone on any of the other councils, or for Croke Park. Every year they try to get the schedule right, and every year they can’t quite seem to manage it.

It was ever thus. The qualifiers are a joke, the scheduling is bockety, and the national broadcaster makes a very middling effort to give Gaelic football the serious analysis it deserves.

And despite all this, the glory of the Championship itself, for all its flaws, still shines incandescent through the summer. It captivates, infuriates enthralls and enraptures us, summer after summer, year after year.

This time last year the Championship looked like a two-horse race between Cork and Kerry. But the rebels got cold-cocked in the quarter-finals when Mayo forgot their place behind the door and Kevin McMenamon did what so few have been able to do in over one hundred years of All-Ireland finals – deliver Kerry a knock-out blow.

One year on, and Dublin have blazed a trail for the rest. Cork and Kerry remain favourites of course, but where Dublin lead other can follow. Dublin can even follow themselves – they enjoy home advantage all through the Championship, and have the boost that winning the title brings.

Mickey Harte is trying to do what only Seán Boylan has done before in the modern era, and build two different Championship winning teams. Kildare’s knocking on the door is getting louder and louder. Derry remain a mystery and Mayo – well, Mayo are a question for another day.

Sligo and New York fired the first shots of the Championship the week before last, and there are five games this weekend to keep things rolling. Of those five, Galway’s trip to Roscommon and Donegal’s trip to Cavan are the most appealing to people outside the counties involved.

The RTÉ panelists will hold their noses after the games. Somebody will dutifully patronise the players, while emphasising that none of this matter a whizz outside of June 10^th in Páirc Uí Chaoimh.

Which is exactly the attitude of people who can’t tell Jedward from Beethoven. To see the Championship as only being about the contenders is too see the great Pyramids at Giza and think they’re nice, alright, but wouldn’t they be even nicer with a nice bit of decking out the back?

The very existence of either the Championship or the Pyramids is a miracle in the 21^st Century, and something we should make the most of while either or both are still here.

Somebody will win the Championship this year, but that’s not the Championship is about. The Championship is about all these fantastic local rivalries, the myriad border words that are its heart, its soul and its splendor.

Besides, it’s a knockout Championship. Anyone can win the thing if their sails catch the wind and the ball hops right. Reader, think on the Hyde on Sunday and the great summers ahead, and drink deeply of the fine and tawny wine of its glory.

The Role of the Pundit

Willie Joe, the eminence behind the Mayo GAA Blog, opined on Saturday that the opinion of the national GAA pundits doesn’t matter. “Such babble is simply noise, annoying and grating noise to many ears, but just noise nonetheless,” wrote that great and good man.

It is noise, of course. But it shouldn’t be. That’s the point. It shouldn’t be.

There are two types of people to whom punditry – pre and post match analysis of sporting contests, Gaelic football in our particular case – is aimed. The first is the general watcher who doesn’t follow the games and isn’t particularly knowledgeable but is watching because a child or a boyfriend is interested, or a neighbour is playing, or a team has gone deep in the Championship and the whole parish is now talking about nothing else.

The second is the actual fan, who goes to all games at all grades. He or she has maybe played at some level, or coached, or sells the club lotto on Saturday night. But that doesn’t mean that he or she has ever played in Croke Park before 50,000 people and knows what that extraordinary experience is like. He or she has watched Championships unfold year after year and likes to compare one year with another, one team with another, one player with another, one philosophy or experience with another.

In other words, punditry should reach out to everyone who watches the game, irrespective of the level of his or her own knowledge, experience or exposure. Neither of these needs is being met.

Part of it, of course, is because of our national refusal to ever take anything seriously. Sure it’s only a bit of craic. People think it’s a laugh to see Brolly and Pat Spillane getting stuck into each other.

If I want a laugh I’ll read the Program for Government. Football is serious, and due deference should be paid. Deference should be paid for those who don’t live and die by the game but are still interested for all the reasons listed above.

Deference should be paid for those who do live and die by the game and expect it to be analysed by those for whom the game has the same magnitude in their lives.

That’s the problem with the current level of punditry. It’s not that pundits are too harsh on players. It’s that they’re not harsh enough.

Pat Spillane rowed back on his (typically strident) criticism of Donegal in the very first game of the Championship after Donegal won their first Ulster title in nineteen years earlier this month. It’d be easier to respect Spillane if he said he still couldn’t stand it, matteradamn how many Anglo-Celts they win. At least he’d be consistent, instead of running with both hare and hounds. He’ll be back damning them again when – if – they lose again in the Championship, thus making you wonder if he only took a crack because he thought it was a free shot. There’s something kind of rotten about that sort of behaviour.

People think that controversy is better than the mind-numbing and stomach churning smugness of the BBC’s Match of the Day couch. But what’s currently served by RTÉ isn’t controversy. It’s lads acting the jackass. Lads who are just as capable of the BBC’s old pals act when the son of one of the guild is playing. For instance.

And it doesn’t have to be that way. There is a new generation of pundits now, men who call the game as they see it but who don’t rub players noses in it either. Anthony Tohill and Dara Ó Cinnéide on RTÉ, and Peter Canavan on TV3 are superb, to name but three. The sooner they take over from the washed out vaudeville of the current RTÉ front line panel the better off the game and the people will be.

Well Done The Sunday Game, the Most Important Program in Ireland

Des Cahill’s Sunday Game goes from strength to strength. Cahill’s tenure in the most important job in Irish television got off to a wonderful start last year when his effortlessly amiable manner put GAA men at ease, as opposed to the Defcon 1 necessary for a chat with Cahill’s immediate predecessor, Pat Spillane.

The standard of analysis on The Sunday Game is so much better than it was too. Rather than ape what’s emerging as the RTÉ Sport house style of forming panels along the Contrarian/Someone with a clue model, Cahill allows his panelists to share what they know from lifetimes in the game. Not all the panelists are great of course, but still. It’s a start.

Last night Cahill rose to another challenge, and he deserves credit for it. Sligo v Leitrim was never likely to be a feature game when Kerry, Cork and Kildare are all playing. The fact that people expect their TV sports presented in a certain way makes it hard on Irish broadcasters too, because the GAA, to its glory, is not a professional sport.

It exists in a different sort of reality and the Irish media hasn’t really come to grips with finding the correct voice for that, a voice that finds the balance between the journalist’s duty to report facts, and common decency’s duty not to hammer a guy who did his best and has to go to work in the morning. It’s very hard to strike a balance between the marquee needs of television and the pride of village needs of the ordinary GAA person.

But last night The Sunday Game came up trumps. They can’t have been expecting the story of the day to happen in Markiewicz Park on Sunday morning but it did and The Sunday Game were able to change their schedules to accommodate it.

Again, it doesn’t seem like much, featuring Leitrim’s triumphant win over Sligo first in the show rather than down the order, but it was something that was beyond the Sunday Game’s newsroom colleagues at six and at nine o’clock.

Is this because RTÉ have upped their game in the light of Newstalk’s challenge on the radio? It’s possible, but it doesn’t matter. All that does matter is that there is a rising standard in the way the games are covered. Each can make the other better by forcing excellence, instead of settling for the mediocrity that comes from monopoly.

Your correspondent was contacted on Twitter during the weekend over some robust criticism of a GAA piece on The Journal on Friday night, since taken down. My friend told me, in not so many words, that we have all sinned and fallen short of the glory of God and, as such, perhaps I shouldn’t have gone so medieval in my remarks.

And I take that on board. Few things are as hateful as bullies. But it’s also important to have standards and if we don’t excoriate the mediocre we can never identify the good. So hail, then, The Sunday Game, for not going through the motions and giving Leitrim their due.

GAA isn’t like other sports. There is nothing more local than the GAA and it’s from this local rivalry that the organisation derives its great strength. The GAA doesn’t exist in the same world of glamour as English soccer or European rugby. But for the people of Roscommon and Letrim in the joyous three weeks of anticipation ahead of them, it’s Heaven descended unto the Earth.

The GAA means nothing in the world of Eurovision or X-Factor or Glenda and Rosanna. It exists somewhere else; in shops where people get messages, marts where farmers look and don’t buy, bars that sell pints of special and locals keep money for funeral pints in jars. It’s outside church gates and chip shops and petrol stations and all the places where people meet to talk and ask well; how do you think they’ll do on Sunday? It’s a magical place, really. I think they call it “Ireland.”

Des Cahill, and the Most Important Job on Television

The jury is in. Des Cahill is doing a superb job as host of The Sunday Game.

There were concerns in some quarters – in this quarter, actually – that Des was too much of a party man to host the most important sports show in Ireland. The Sunday Game is the true Dáil Éireann, the meeting of the Gael where issues of great national import are discussed. You can’t – or at least, you shouldn’t – have any eejit in the chair and the concern was that Cahill’s tremendous need to be liked would cloud his journalistic judgement.

Des used to get very uncomfortable on Sportscall when people called in to question refereeing decisions – how would he handle the white heat of the Sunday Game sofas?

As it turns out Des handles the challenges like Jack O’Connor handles his footballers – both are men fully in control of their kingdoms. Now in mid-season form in his second season, Des Cahill’s particular gifts are clear, and the Sunday Game is much better as a result.

Cahill’s first gift is his ability to put people at ease. Cahill’s immediate predecessor on the Sunday night show, Pat Spillane, not only had no interest in putting people at their ease, Pateen rather revelled in making his guests suffer. If people stood up to him and gave as good as they got, it made for great TV. But nobody ever did.

A Sunday Game panellist is not a media creature. He is more familiar with Anton O’Toole than Anton Savage, and for this we should all thank the good God. But it does mean that the panellists are often uncomfortable in the studio, meaning that they clam up and say nothing. And that’s no good.

Cahill gift is to coax the panel’s real opinions out of them. He establishes a bond of trust with them that makes them visibly more relaxed, making them forgot they’re on TV in the first place, and allowing them to express the same opinions they would to the buck standing next to them at a game. It looks easy, but it’s not. It’s a gift as much as it’s a skill, and Cahill has it.

Cahill’s second gift, his remarkable empathy, is the reason that the panellists so warm to him. Cahill is a man who is actually interested in what they have to say, even to the extent of getting lost himself in the conversation.

Some presenters will look at the clipboard to see what’s next to the detriment of the conversation. A panellist could remark as an aside that a certain county has introduced the revolutionary idea of conjuring the Hornèd One on Walpurgis night to see if the Dark Lord can play on the edge of the square for seventy minutes on Sunday as they’re wild stuck.

This won’t knock a stir out of Clipboard Man, who will only make a hamfisted link to the Lory Meagher Cup item that’s next on The List. By contrast, Des will happily clear the decks to discuss the prospect of the smell of sulphur outweighing that of Deep Heat in coming years, and let Lory paddle his own canoe for a while.

This attention to detail is the pearl beyond price for this sort of show, because Des Cahill wants to discuss what everybody is discussing on Sunday night, rather than being in thrall to a running order set in stone.

An Spailpín suspects that Des is a little starstruck after all these years, which is wonderful. One problem with working in TV is that people can think they’re the star. Whereas last Sunday night Cahill was clearly awestruck in having Diarmuid Ó Súilleabháin in the studio, and thrilled to broadcast the Rock’s famous point against Limerick again.

It was the same when Cahill hosted that tribute to the Munster Championship last year. It was hard not to have one’s back up slightly at one Championship being elevated above all the rest, but Cahill was so drawn by the stars in the room that it was impossible not be drawn in just as much. Cork legend Kevin Hennessy was a particular star that night, and An Spailpín hopes he’s still doing well.

Gaelic Games are amateur sports played in a very small country where everybody knows everybody else. That makes them extremely difficult to report on, because you can’t pick on amateur players who do not pull down the sort of money Ronaldo et al do, but you can’t not analyse the games either.

The Sunday Game doesn’t always get it right. An Spailpín thought the Leitrim full-back could have done without getting patronised by Pat Spillane a few weeks ago, for instance – but Des Cahill’s enchantment with the games reflects the enchantment of the Gael, and we rest easy that the true Dáil is at last in full session. Besides; Dara Ó Cinnéide still has time on his side.

What Will Des Cahill's Sunday Game Be Like?

Yesterday evening’s announcement of Des Cahill as the new presenter of the Sunday Game is something of a disappointment. It’s not as shattering a disappointment as watching your Bank of Ireland shares go down the Swanee River, but there is a certain weight on the heart.

It’s hard not to worry that the evening Sunday Game, the single most important TV program to the GAA fan, will end up being the Road to Croker II, a lot of soft old blather. Dara Ó Cinnéide or Setanta's Daire O'Brien would have been An Spailpín’s choice as Sunday Game presenter, but Cahill is popular in RTÉ, and popular counts.

There is an understanding abroad that Des Cahill is a GAA man, especially after his rescuing of the Late Late Show GAA special. An Spailpín couldn’t really say as I didn’t see the show, and would maintain that anyone who sat down to watch that show in the first place was naïve in the extreme, as it could only ever have been terrible.

Marty Whelan won Celebrity Bainisteoir I believe – should Marty host the Sunday Game? Celebrity Bainisteoir and the Late Late Show are mass appeal entertainment programs. They have nothing to do with sports journalism, which is where discussion of the Sunday Game should begin and end.

It would take a level of imagination that is not common in the Irish media to even attempt the change of perspective a real GAA show would require rather than the lazy platitudes we usually get. Gaelic games are not like other sports. It needs to be discussed in a different language.

There seems to be an opinion abroad that Cahill will “ask the hard questions.” People don’t always think through what they mean by that. The GAA is an amateur organisation with amateur players, who all have to go back to work on Monday. Trial by media and slow-motion replays do not suit the games or the Irish psyche.

Last year’s Galvin affair, which you would think cut and dried, was anything but. This is the problem the Sunday Game will always face. Is the appointment of Des Cahill an attempt to address that, or is it just RTÉ wheeling out their Doctor Doolittle?

Has GAA journalism has existed for over a hundred years without ever evolving its own voice? Not at all. Mick Dunne and Jim Carney were GAA men to the fingertips, but their particular style is seen as terribly passé in Donnybrook right now. Whereas Des is such a teddy bear, and even though he’s true blue Dubbalin man he worked in the country, you know. As far the Donnybrook panjandrums are concerned, Cahill is like the old lady in Airplane: “oh stewardess – I speak jive.”

Des Cahill can speak to the country bumpkins, and that gives him kudos in Donnybrook for this post. What also gives him kudos is that he has the gift of serving two masters – while his public persona is that of the man on the street, anyone paying attention to the way he chaired Sportscall will have noted that Des always took the side of authority. Telling Des about overcrowding in Tuam or Thurles was always likely to hear a recitation of the party line.

Presenting the Sunday Game will not be an easy job. Des Cahill has an extreme disadvantage in that his most obvious point of comparison is the RTÉ soccer panel, who are tremendous. But is not a fair comparison – soccer as commentated on Johnny Giles is a professional game played by millionaires. GAA men drive forklifts for Beamish and Crawford and farm fields of rushes. You cannot speak about GAA players who are playing for love in the same language you use to speak about divers, cheats, cowards and spivs who are pulling down hundreds of thousands of pounds per week.

There’s no law that says you have to hammer someone to be a legitimate journalist. And this is especially the case when you’re commentating on amateur players playing an amateur game.

Des Cahill will have to decide whom he would like to serve as presenter of the Sunday Game. Shall he serve the establishment, RTÉ, the players, his own comfort zone, or any combination of the above?

The evening Sunday Game is more important that the live afternoon show because GAA people are at matches during the live show. But they need – need – the half-nine show for analysis of their own game and the national state of things. And your deeply concerned correspondent often wonders if RTÉ actually understands this.

The single most important Sunday Game of the year is the one of the night of the All-Ireland finals. RTÉ seem utterly oblivious to this fact, and are ruining it currently by featuring reviews of the year, teams of the year, live links from the winning teams’ hotels and a lot of people pig drunk in different boozers in the winning counties. Who cares? This is Bláthnaid Ní Chofaigh stuff – it has nothing to do with sport.

Win or lose, the essential thing for the GAA fan coming back from the All-Ireland is to see the Sunday Game, meaning game footage and analysis. It’s essential. To see just how essential we can now take a trip through time and space, to the great town of Ballivor, Co Meath, on the night of the 28th of September, 1997.

If we visit one of the pubs therein, we will behold some sorrowful Mayomen in the green and red finery watching the Muiris Mac Gearailt All-Ireland on the Sunday Game to the amusement and pity of the locals. That was a long night twelve years ago, but to drive on and miss the Sunday Game would have been like ordering a pint and not finishing it. It. Just. Isn't. Done.

An Spailpín wishes Des Cahill all the best in his new role. His is a great responsibility and we need him to do well. Go n-éirí leis.





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