How Second Captains broke the mould – and brought 10,000 people with them

They never go home, those boys.

They’re much too busy, really.

Joe Duffy’s snappy six-word ode to the indefatigable spirit of Second Captains may not beat the thoughtful, oft-misattributed ‘harder I work, luckier I get’ adage for eloquence, but in its own neat way, it fits.

His cute summary makes for illuminating in-studio company, emanating proudly in large black letters from a giant light box touching distance from the microphones; old-school cinema signage a reminder of what a big-time feature this project has become.

Second Captains  - made up of Eoin McDevitt, Ciarán Murphy, Ken Early, Mark Horgan and Simon Hick - was born in 2013 after the quintet quit their lengthy, award-winning Off The Ball gig following a dispute with Newstalk management.

Two months following their abrupt exit, the classic Republic of Ireland crest was given new life as the team set about discovering independence away from traditional radio, firstly with a traditional podcast supported by the Irish Times, before the more radical move to exclusive online content in 2017. The hope was that an audience would both follow and grow from scratch. The reality has been an overwhelming endorsement of the idea that people will pay for quality.

“There’s nothing else there - it’s us,” McDevitt says. “There’s a great freedom attached to that independence, to go and do whatever type of shows we think are good.”

As with the crest, the name shares DNA with the national football side, deriving from a dismissive Steve Staunton retort aimed in the direction of Early at an Ireland press conference.

Rare the occasion that a journalist subsequently enjoys a more gilded career than their managerial subject matter - however withering they may be - but such is the grim tale of Steve Staunton; Ireland boss, and such is the resilience of Early’s five-a-side team.

Five years, that same number of TV series, a pair of annuals, numerous live shows home and away and well over 1100 episodes on from their first official shots in anger, Second Captains are in buoyant voice when JOE arrives at their townhouse HQ in Dublin city centre on a blindingly sunny Tuesday afternoon.

Outside, the signature shamrock and vivid microphone take pride of place by the door, rather outdoing the neighbours for household marker aesthetics. Inside, the velvet-lined stairs take you past framed photographs of live events past and various sporting memorabilia in the form of portraits, board games and other enviable collector’s items.

What passes for an office is really more of a living room with a large square table in the centre.

Slumped low in a chair to the point that he’s almost quite literally part of the furniture, Ken Early regards his MacBook with a look that suggests the machine has betrayed his trust. He’s either zoned out, in the zone, or remembers this writer from that time he was accosted in a pub smoking area and grilled about football for an hour and change.

In truth, Early was much more affable than he arguably needed to be on that particular occasion, not least when you take into consideration that he and his cohorts likely get the ear worn off them by strangers on the regular.

With over 10,000 paid subscribers happy to fork out the average price of a pint every month for the unlimited access offered up by its dedicated World Service - random drunken boozer chatter should not necessarily be expected - Second Captains has evolved into a genuine community.

Working to a successful members-focused model allows for a high frequency of episodes, the legitimisation of their independent ethos, and a nice presenter’s perk of no longer having to explain what a podcast is to befuddled friends and relatives.

Indeed, as podcasting begins to flourish in Ireland, the Second Captains find themselves as not only leaders in a pacy enough field, but as a dynamic forum in which forensic analysis extends beyond the usual talking points of the game gone by.

One day after the not guilty verdicts were reached at the conclusion of the Belfast rape trial last month, the team convened for an episode that continues to be held aloft as a force for potential positive change, particularly where toxic male attitudes towards women are concerned.

Episode #1124 of the Second Captains podcast brought contributions from regular panelist Richie Sadlier and journalist Sinead O’Carroll. The resulting discussion on consent and the dangers of the privileges enjoyed by sportsmen generated important conversation and enjoyed worldwide acclaim. Sadlier would provide a capsule version on The Ray D’Arcy show a few days later.

Though Second Captains is rightly regarded as an often light-hearted look at the world of sport, a focus on more sobering topics doesn’t feel jarring. That balance is tricky, but conviction goes a long way and the foundations for such debate have been long set in stone.

As they look ahead to this year’s Cat Laughs festival in Kilkenny where Second Captains Live will return to take late night Friday honours, hosts Eoin McDevitt and Ciarán ‘Murph’ Murphy appreciate the strange juxtaposition that their show has carved out.

“It’s funny when you look at it and think you can do a show about consent and about sexual boundaries and you can also do a show like last year about David O’Doherty tackling Denis Hickie in a schools rugby match in the early 1990s and get laughs out of an audience,” offers McDevitt, sitting a few feet away from the mock gravestone presented to O’Doherty last year. The comedian ultimately decided it was better off in the studio.

“Once we decide something is a good idea, we can go after it,” McDevitt adds. “I feel like that’s the biggest strength we have at the moment.”

Returning to the consent episode; for McDevitt in the position of host, one of the most important aspects of his role was simply to let the conversation breathe.

“It’s a challenging topic,” notes McDevitt. “You are wary, and certainly the night before I was a little bit nervous because I didn’t want to say the wrong thing or put my foot in it or say something that is potentially hurtful to people who have experienced anything in that area, but it comes down to the contributors you have in a situation like that, and also your relationships with people.

“Richie, we know really, really well, we’ve had him on a million times, he hosts the Player’s Chair podcast on our network, and we’ve had Sinead in quite a few times as well, and we know she’s super smart and well able to talk about those kind of topics. To be honest, in terms of presenting it I knew that they were going to bring quite a lot and that I didn’t have to force the conversation too much, and that made it easier to sit back a little bit and let them get on with it.”

Given that Second Captains has a lot of masters to serve as part of an ever-growing social media-friendly community, did any dissenting voices emerge in the wake of the episode?

“Not really,” says Murphy. “No, I don’t think so. I mean, maybe, and I’m talking about less than a full handful of tweets from people who don’t have names on their Twitter accounts, but that’s the reality of Twitter so it’s not like that’s a big deal either. The result of the trial turned out to be very polarising, but the conversation that we had, that was the thing that we wanted to avoid entirely; this idea that there was somehow two sides to this, as opposed to it just being a thing that we were desperate to talk about, and that we all need to talk about.

“Rosanna Cooney's work from the courthouse  was absolutely brilliant, and I’m sure that her article wasn’t a polarising thing at all - but sometimes it’s inevitable that that happens. The community that you talk about is paying five euro a month plus VAT to listen to us, so maybe it’s entirely within the bounds of possibility that the people who are doing that think the same way that we do about a lot of things. We opened it out to everyone, and it got a huge amount of listens.”

McDevitt picks up the thread.

“There was a lot of online stuff, there was a lot of reaction to our Twitter posts about the podcast, so there was plenty of scope there for people who want to get to offended by these type of things to get offended and to say that we approached it the wrong way,” he considers.

“I hadn’t really thought about it, because we’ve been so happy by the feedback we’ve gotten, I haven’t really thought - ‘Well, why hasn’t this gotten any negative feedback?’ - I’d rather not think about it, I suppose! I think people recognised that the conversation was exactly as Murph said; it was not set up to be antagonistic, it was set up to be enlightening and in some way informative and thought-provoking, rather than rage-provoking.”

Even before that landmark hour, there was the sense that Second Captains might represent something of a social barometer for the average guy on the street. How does that sit with them?

“Well, I think we are the average guy on the street,” McDevitt quickly acknowledges. “I think we’re entitled to discuss things that aren’t strictly related to sport, and aren’t just about who’s won the match the previous night and who’s played well. That’s obviously a big part of it as well, I don’t want to gloss over that and make it sound like we’re coming from this high and mighty position where we’re pontificating about every ill in society, that’s not the case.

“But, increasingly as years have gone on, I’ve found that be it doping, or this culture of attitudes towards women; there’s a lot of stuff that comes out of sport that isn’t always very edifying and to ignore all of that would just seem wrong. I think it would be… a dereliction of duty sounds a little bit over the top, but…

“I know what you’re saying, though,” nods Murphy. “At the end of the day, the stuff that you see in sport is oftentimes a magnification or a microcosm of something else that’s going on in society, and the idea that you just say, ‘Well, it’s different, it’s sport so that doesn’t matter,’ or that it matters less in sports than it does in other places, there is wilful ignorance in that, more so than us saying, ‘Here’s Eoin McDevitt’s final thoughts’ - you can’t do that, either.”

Ever deferential, McDevitt speaks to the importance of getting the right people involved.

“In that case, it was Richie and Sinead,” he notes. “In the case of former Irish swimming coach George Gibney, who we talked about recently - he’s still on the run in America, he was charged years ago with sexual crimes against children - in the case of that story, we had Justine McCarthy in studio who is absolutely brilliant and I think we had a good conversation. Again, that’s one of those stories which unfortunately exists in the realm of sport. You don’t go into work every day thinking, ‘Oh I want to talk about sexual abuse or child abuse today,’ and you don’t have to, it’s your own choice, but I feel that we should do that, to be honest with you.”

On a lighter yet still especially contentious note, what of the whole ‘Soccer vs. Rugby’ debate? Ireland’s recent success in the latter and struggles in the former suggest that both national outfits are operating at polar opposites. Is there any value in directly contrasting the two as Neil Francis did in a controversial Sunday Independent column a few weeks back?

“Generally, it’s really hard to compare both,” says Murphy. “I actually think it’s kind of impossible, to be honest. With the rugby, they’re seeing progress on the back of very astute management but the control that they have over their team is a million miles away from the control that the FAI have over their team. The Irish players play for Ireland and are on secondment to their clubs, basically. The soccer team couldn’t be more different.”

“Neil Francis can write that rugby is now the national sport, as he did recently…” begins McDevitt.

Do you think that it is?

“How do you define what the national sport is? I don’t know what Neil Francis’ thought process is. He could well think it, but with the reaction, immediately battle lines are drawn and everyone is taking these ridiculously strongly-held positions over something that is so inconsequential. We were talking earlier on about the Paddy Jackson case and the questions out of that and people taking entrenched views there. That’s a serious topic. There’s a reason why people feel emotionally charged by that kind of thing. I don’t understand why people feel so emotionally charged about whether or not football is better than rugby.

“Maybe it’s my own background in sport, where I was brought up to love them all, or certainly most of them, and there was never this idea that this one was better than that one or that you shouldn’t be supporting that. One of the good things about sport is that you can support whichever national team you want, but to be made feel bad about it by supporters of another national team representing your country in a different ball game, suddenly you’re bringing a negativity into it when it should be a positive. There’s enough negativity, and we’ll all talk about the negativity, but let’s not drum it up where there isn’t any.”

Murphy moves to draw a line beneath the argument.

 

“It’s like, ‘We feel good, and in order for us to feel good, we have to make someone else feel bad.’ You see that in sport. The hurling memes where some guy gets his head split open and literally within five minutes Twitter is like, ‘Compare that now to the football lads!’”

In terms of Irish sports journalism, where are we at right now?

“I think we have a load of really good writers in Ireland, if you’re just talking about written word sports journalism,” suggests Murphy.

“Some of the stuff I see getting retweeted 10,000 times in the UK… I’ve seen a couple of articles written in UK newspapers about the connection between people and clubs getting honestly about 300,000 retweets and whatever, but Keith Duggan and Malachy Clerkin and these guys do three of these a week.

I think we’re absolutely blessed as a nation [in that regard.] He’s not here so I can say it; Ken is absolutely one of the best out there. There’s still unbelievably good written word journalism in Ireland. I think it’s something we should be nearly proud of. Our best guys are right up there, absolutely right up there.”

Is it a badge of honour for a Ken Early when Eamon Dunphy goes in two-footed on him?

“Yeah, probably,” smiles McDevitt. “I don’t know if Ken saw it as a badge of honour. I think he was highly amused by it, to be honest. And then of course we got the two of them in here and Eamon was as nice as pie. He’s nice, he’s come on our show a few times. I think the Dunphy/Early dynamic is pretty healthy, pretty respectful.”

Up next is Kilkenny’s legendary Cat Laughs festival where the boys will take to the live stage on the June Bank Holiday weekend.

This year’s guests are currently top secret, though last year’s effort boasted the aforementioned David O’Doherty and Dara O’Briain, with whom Murphy enjoyed a particularly specific and memorable connection.

Murphy: “Last year was absolutely brilliant. It was one of the best times I’ve had there.”

McDevitt: “Well you’re saying that because you ended up watching the Champions League final in a pub with Dara O’Briain. I was there too, but you were in his ear about how useless Mario Mandžukić was.”

Murphy: “We had a real bonding moment where the two of us were like, ‘This guy is a complete donkey. He’s just being found out here tonight,’ literally just as the ball was spiralling into the top corner for one of the great Champions League final goals.”

McDevitt: “Fortunately for you they were beaten, and thus everybody forgot about it. If that had been a match-winning goal, it would be replayed for all time.”

And sure who’d go home after that?

Second Captains were in conversation with JOE ahead of their appearance at this year’s Kilkenny Cat Laughs Comedy Festival. Second Captains Live takes to the stage at the Kilbride Suite at the Ormonde Hotel at 22:30 on Friday 1 June.