The RTE panel are back in the spotlight once again after their treatment of Noel King of late, but do they still set the bar when it comes to football analysis? Two JOEs make the case for and against Giles, Dunphy, Brady and company.
Sean Nolan says… Best in the business? For entertainment, and for sheer watchability, they can’t be touched. And the addition of a few new faces makes them even better.
Billo, Giles, Eamo and Liam; the names roll off the tongue and most of us have spent more hours watching them on TV than we have any other Irish programme or personality.
However, with Bill set to hang up his microphone after Brazil 2014, we are heading to the end of an era, and some would have you believe this is a good thing. Trust me, it’s not.
We have been blessed to have the most entertaining football analysts the world has ever seen and I for one hope they go on for as long as possible. And, even with Billo gone, we reckon Darragh Moloney is more than an okey doke replacement, so the show should keep rolling along.
Over on Sky, Gary Neville, and now Jamie Carragher, are producing some top class stuff on their Monday night show, but just because that show is a great watch, it doesn’t mean the RTE lads show is any less entertaining than it ever was.
The RTE lads have been on the go for a long time now, so a certain level of audience fatigue is inevitable, but the producers have realised that and a few new faces, most notably Richie Sadlier, freshen up the trio and add a more modern, detailed analysis, but it is for the more entertaining stuff that we still largely tune in.
Yes, Dunphy is frequently wrong, over the top and infuriating, but he is also charming, passionate and still hits the nail on the head for how many fans are feeling, especially when it comes to the national team. Giles, the voice of reason, speaks a lot of sense about how the game hasn’t changed from his day (it hasn’t, so the fundamentals of his analysis are always sound) and Brady is the perfect foil for Eamon, sparking off him perfectly as he draws on his years playing in England and Italy.
They might not have lots of flat screens, or spend 20 minutes analysing the corner routines of Cardiff City, but you can get that elsewhere. What you won’t get elsewhere is a very Irish viewpoint on the game, delivered with bags of humour, charm and decades of experience in the game.
Sure they screw up, and sure they repeat themselves, but for me they are still the complete package when it comes to football panels and cameos by the likes of Sadlier, Didi Hamann and Kenny Cunningham improve the show without changing the formula too much.
They are the single best reason for paying your licence fee (or broadcast charge or whatever it is called now).
Sadly, we won’t really appreciate them until they are gone…
Conor Heneghan says… it is a measure of how poor this World Cup qualifying campaign has been for Ireland that the post-match analysis provided by the RTE panel has been consistently more entertaining than what has happened on the pitch.
And it’s hard to argue with the fact that, at times, the debates between Billo (or Darragh) and the Holy Trinity of Giles, Dunphy and Brady (or Richie Sadlier, a most welcome addition to the panel) makes for truly compulsive viewing, as it did following Noel King’s somewhat bizarre post-match interview with Tony O’Donoghue last night.
But when it boils down to it, do we find ourselves glued to the television because of the sophisticated level of actual football analysis on show, or because it provides such entertainment value, particularly when Dunphy feels the need to add the word ‘baby’ to the end of a sentence?
I think it’s fair to say that most people would support the latter viewpoint and while I would still take that above the majority of football punditry that exists in other mediums, other broadcasters have raised the bar to the extent that RTE’s often lazy analysis when it comes to the football side of things doesn’t cut it anymore.
The admiration for Gary Neville has descended into a love-in at this stage but it doesn’t take away from the fact that he really is a top class analyst, while Jamie Carragher has shown signs of promise alongside him in a Monday Night Football slot that is still finding its feet but is already starting to become essential viewing for hardcore football fans.
Closer to home, the football slots on Newstalk’s Off the Ball and the Second Captains podcast always make for interesting listening, as does arguably the Daddy of all football podcasts, Football Weekly on the Guardian, anchored by the peerless James Richardson.
The last few shows I mentioned there have the advantage of the fact that they don’t have the added pressures of live television but you’re certainly unlikely to hear generalisations like ‘they’re an Eastern European side Bill, so they’re bound to be technically gifted’ or ‘they’re an African side Bill, so they’re always likely to be tactically naïve,’ observations which, although they might not have been repeated word for word, have been heard from the RTE panel over the years.
The RTE panel are at their most watchable when they engage in (often heated) debate and indeed, the most memorable moments they have produced in recent years have been when at least two of the panel have gone head to head on a particular subject, whether it was Giles and Dunphy on Roy Keane and Saipan, Dunphy and Brady on Trapattoni or when they collectively expressed their disgust for Cristiano Ronaldo before dramatically changing their tune in recent years.
Are these debates entertaining? Sure. Do we learn anything that we didn’t know already bar the fact that some of the pundits seem to have a personal vendetta against certain players? I’m not so sure.
Ronaldo is just one of the players who has suffered quite savage personal criticism at the hands of the panel over the years and while we’re all for saying things as they see it, sometimes they, and Dunphy in particular, go too far.
None of their victims have a right to reply, victims like Glenn Whelan, of whom Dunphy said the following before issuing a quite pithy apology recently.
“He’s a terrible player. He can’t run, he can’t pass, he can’t tackle, he doesn’t see anything. He’s a very lucky lad to have 50 caps for Ireland.”
Whelan did eventually respond by labelling Dunphy a ‘bully’ but for the most part these extremely harsh character assassinations are going unpunished.
We’re sure some people would love to publicly pull Dunphy up on his frequent and instant changes in opinion (his verdicts on Ronaldo and the Bundesliga, for example) or further examine his knowledge of Spanish football, a subject he often claims to be an expert on, probably after watching a couple of games involving the big two or Atletico Madrid (his most recent cause celebre) on a Sunday night.
But nobody pulls Dunphy up on those flaws, or Giles on his often questionable sweeping generalisations (formations don’t really matter, Bill) or Brady for his grumpiness because they get away with it and have been getting away with it for some time.
Noel King may have made a bit of fool himself in doing so but in questioning the nigh on untouchable RTE panel, he provoked an interesting debate about their relevance and credibility in the modern era, when clued-in fans are looking for a little more than an argument and sound-bytes that have been trotted out regularly in the past.
The RTE panel do an awful lot right and hopefully they continue to do so, but entertaining as they are, they’re not infallible either and the sooner they realise that, the less chance there is of their model becoming dated in comparison with their competitors.
