A single phone call could insulate The Sunday Game for next decade against any rising damp of pastel banality
independent.ie | October 18, 2022 02:10 PM
Expand Close Former panellists for The Sunday Game Colm O’Rourke, Joe Brolly and Pat Spillane / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Former panellists for The Sunday Game Colm O’Rourke, Joe Brolly and Pat Spillane
It would require evident courage, a willingness to swallow a sizeable portion of humble pie, and a retreat from a culture of cowed, antiseptic thinking.
And then, an inclination to dial 1-800-Brolly.
A new era for The Sunday Game should be constructed around the twin talents of the old and new: Joe Brolly and Philly McMahon, a pair of fearless, technicolour individuals with penetrating views and an off-piste way of thinking.
For a variety of reasons, the aforementioned investment on the Cats dethroning Kerry (even if hurling’s striped stronghold doesn’t currently submit a team to take part in the senior football conversation) might offer a more realistic chance of yielding a dividend.
This is particularly the case after relationships soured to the point where Brolly initiated High Court action against RTÉ last year over a non-sports broadcasting matter.
But if the chances of his second coming inhabit the territory between “slim” and “none”, the potential – both in box-office, but more importantly, in stimulating the kind of trenchant, erudite debate that set RTÉ sports coverage apart from the rest – in such a development is self-evident.
Joe is a fascinating, complex, divisive, contradictory, sometimes infuriating individual.
In a fraction of the time it takes for The Sunday Game’s James Last theme tune to signal the dawn of another summer, he can morph from big-hearted ode to the GAA’s cultural beauty, to unleashing a rhapsody of rhetoric that compels RTÉ editors to sound the air-raid sirens.
The fantasy island of his mind delivers a wild, unruly cocktail of humour, piercing intelligence, egotistical, one-eyed rants, love poems to an organisation that inhabits his core, and a Vesuvian volatility, one that can see any debate explode, at no-notice, into full shock-and-awe eruption.
Over the years he has made me laugh, prompted me to think deeply on a subject, to examine my own views, but has also made me want to put my foot through the screen.
On any number of occasions I have disagreed with the theses fired from his studio soapbox. As Marty Morrissey or Seán Cavanagh could testify, some of the more extreme and hurtful polemics were ill-judged and authentically offensive.
Sometimes – and here I cite personal experience - the brave and correct approach is to apply a filter rather than ramble on insensitively into cruel terrain.
Yet, in spite or because of all this, it would be a real signal of bold intent if RTÉ was to invite Brolly to sail again on forbidden seas.
This is not intended as some populist anti-Montrose tirade for something none of us expect to happen.
The national broadcaster does many things exceptionally well and is certainly not alone among media organisations – including this one – in being painfully and acutely aware of Ireland’s absurdly draconian libel laws, a legal reality that is a huge enemy to robust, free-flowing, access-all-areas debate.
Equally, whether you agreed or disagreed, thought them cutting-edge or ill-informed anachronisms, the loss of Brolly, Spillane, Eamon Dunphy, John Giles and George Hook has washed out much of the colour from the station’s coverage.
Those days when the post-match analysis of a rugby/football international or a big championship clash stopped the nation in its tracks – when the opinions offered in studio were frequently more anticipated than the preceding contest – are gone.
TV3, particularly when it had Ronan O’Gara on rugby duty, or when the outstanding Tommy Martin is jamming with Brian Kerr and Graeme Souness on European or international match nights, is now, for many, the go-to sporting theatre for unmissable, back-and-forth chewing of the fat.
There has been a trend towards more technical and statistical analysis, which was, maybe, overdue.
RTÉ saw the new level of insight Jamie Carragher and Gary Neville have brought to Sky’s Premier League coverage and correctly sought to bring that to GAA analysis.
Critically, Sky have used it to complement rather than replace strident debate.
Their increasingly frequent deployment of Roy Keane – along with offering a window to Neville’s own uncompromising world view – illustrates that a station often accused of being in thrall with the Premier League are unafraid to commission edgy TV.
It is true that Keane can sometimes stray close to the territory of self-parody, of delivering trademark angry soundbites to order, a one-man Deliveroo service for fast-food fury.
But his presence in the studio, delivering that signature drumbeat of disdain for cosseted professionals, is a vital part of the package, that brings with it a frisson of excitement.
Of course, there is an important demarcation between the Premier League and the GAA.
The difference in where debates can and should stray when dealing with amateur players and voluntary officials as opposed to lavishly remunerated professional footballers and the billion-pound corporations they represent is significant.
Still, the simultaneous exit of so many big names offers RTÉ a once-in-a-generation opportunity.
A chance to recalibrate, to start again.
McMahon, a singular thinker, an eight-time All-Ireland winner with a fascinating back story whose insightful, opinionated Irish Independent columns have been a brilliant revelation, is certainly worth a run under the TV lights.
RTÉ will rightly take their time in choosing a presenting successor to Cahill, who, after delivering a distinguished body of work, tired of the cramped format and understandably sought to satisfy an appetite to again attend live matches.
As Des highlighted in a midsummer interview with Vincent Hogan, The Sunday Game format is fatigued.
Any attempt to squeeze coverage and analysis of upwards of 15 matches into a single programme inevitably dilutes the capacity to deal with most of them in anything more than an unsatisfactory, fleeting, blink-and-you-miss it manner.
Given how deeply the GAA, particularly the summer championships, are woven into the tapestry of Irish life, it seems absurd that RTÉ does not screen multiple programmes beyond their excellent live coverage and Sunday highlights.
A vast, untapped audience would surely respond favourably to a well-made Saturday morning Football Focus-type scene setter, a second weekend highlights programme, a midweek magazine discussion show.
The Sunday Game resonates and matters to Irish people in a way only the tiniest few programmes ever have.
This feels like a seismic moment in its story, as pivotal as that dramatic instant in July when Seánie O’Shea stood over a free, knowing the potential to change the course of Kerry football history stood at his feet.
O’Shea held his nerve and found the target. The task for RTÉ is to showcase similar courage in their execution.
