RTÉ punditry for Irish international games has long been an insult to the intelligence, and this week has been no exception.
As everyone now knows, Eamon Dunphy, whose modus operandi in seeking a reaction has, over the past few decades, been like shooting fish in a barrel, got called a skinny little rat for his post-Italy match comments, and we were off again, talking about… Dunphy.
If you look on rte.ie, somewhere you will find him saying sorry, sort of, for his over-the-top dose of righteous indignation. If you don’t want to search, you’ll have to take my word for it, as FP hasn’t the stomach to dignify it with a link, and, in any case, hanging on Dunphy’s every utterance is not really FP territory.
What stood out for me in what in RTÉ Sport-speak passes for ‘analysis’ was Dunphy’s claim that ‘real football people’ were crying, no less, at the appalling spectacle that is the Irish midfield sans the sublime Andy Reid.
This curious designation seems intended to set apart from the rabble a chosen few who have a genuine love of the game and, with it, a special insight that those who dress up as leprechauns and uncritically wave bananas at the boys in green, no matter what, do not possess.
Anyone watching this fare for the first time or from far away might be forgiven that the sentimental sporting sage was talking for a constituency of people who love football so much that they go to support their local club week in, week out, and who stick by their team through thick and thin in spite of, or even because of, the slavish devotion of the great unwashed to the EPL. (Someone, perhaps, like this Dunphy fan who has bought into the package in a rather big way.)
Anyone else would know that was stuff and nonsense. Dunphy and the rest of the panel wouldn’t be caught within an ass’s roar of a LoI game, either working or simply for the enjoyment, and, as the too-familiar saying goes, would pull the curtains if two Irish clubs happened to be playing in their back gardens.
But, in contrast to the furore of his criticism of Trap and the boys, no one has seen fit to take him up on this.
There seems to be a general understanding that, yes, indeed, Dunphy and the group for whom he speaks form some sort of elite who, though emotional and highly-strung, are possessed of a special sensibility that others (and one suspects that he especially means Bill O’Herlihy) will never achieve. And that they can sustain this on a diet exclusively comprising British football while pretending the game does not exist on this island.
So who are these mystical ‘real football people’ keening the demise of the beautiful game as played in green? Are they the ghosts occupying those rows of empty seats at Irish football grounds on Friday nights? Can you hear them weeping, like Eamon imagines he can?
Or can you hear, once again, nothing more than the brazen sound of hypocrisy, cant and easy ratings?
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