A sad day for broadcasting in Ireland.
Ah this is terribly sad. We’ll never see his likes again
Calling out Rod Liddle not just the greatest moment in Irish TV History, but the best moment in Irish history too
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RIP…
It says he’s leaving after 40 years.
Did Dunphy not leave around the mid 90s for a while around the time he was doing the Radio Ireland gig?
Hold on a minute. Was that over Rod Liddle attacking Roy Keane, something Dunphy has done habitually over the last number of years.
Dunphy was absent from RTE’s football coverage for a good stretch of time in the 1990s.
He had a falling out with RTE shortly after Eire qualified for the 1994 World Cup and didn’t appear on their coverage for the finals. He returned intially for the start of the 1998 World Cup qualifiers in August 1996, but then had another falling out with them within a short time - I think it was around May 1997 - he definitely did analysis for Eire’s 3-2 loss in Macedonia in April that year. That absence continued up to and including the 1998 World Cup finals.
Radio Ireland started on St. Patrick’s Day 1997.
He returned for good in September 1998 for the European Championship qualifiers and RTE’s Premier League highlights programme, which started the same month.
Given that Dunphy missed much of the 2002 World Cup after being disciplined for appearing drunk on air for the Japan v Russia game, he didn’t do a full World Cup for RTE from 1990 until 2006.
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Dunphy as an analyst will always be defined by one instance for me.
He was livid that Wes Hoolahan wasn’t picked for Ireland in a match under Trap. He complained that Glen Whelan got the nod ahead of him. Whelan was already shoring up an attacked minded midfield but Eamon didn’t seem to have any grasp of this. Brady explained it to him that if Hoolahan had to start then it couldn’t be at the expense of Whelan given the requirement for a basic structure to a team. Dunphy couldn’t grasp this notion regarding football at its most basic at all.
There were many moment of entertainment with him though. ‘I don’t want to address the Niall Quinn agenda - I think Niall Quinn is a creep. What I want to talk about is Roy Keane’. I also seem to recall him having a huge pop at Stephen Alkin and Ray Treacy before as they commentated on a match away in Romania under McCarthy - something along the line of calling them ‘clowns’. Them meant to be his colleagues of course.
He will mainly be known though for not having a notion of what he was talking about yet actually believing that he did.
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Ronaldo (the skinny one) - “he’s a cod.”
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Some amount of weird, boring bastards on twitter complaining about his lack of knowledge of the game
True and to be fair none of them a johann cruyff .
Anoraks like Bandage and Rocko never twigged that he was in the entertainment business, to drive up ratings. What he knew about soccer was neither here nor there.
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Ronaldo- a show pony
Drogba- a donkey, a troublesome donkey but a donkey
the nation loomed one way. Dunphy looked the other way. (at least that’s how I remember it)
The greatest Irish broadcaster of my lifetime and possibly the greatest WUM Ireland has ever produced. I want to pay my respects somehow, is there a book of condolences at RTE?
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His podcast is very good. Repetitive at times but that is almost part of the appeal as Dunphy has tendency to focus on themes ad nauseam.
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Peak Dunphy was from around 2001 to 2008. Every panel was a must watch and he was prolific with rants during this time. His spats with Brady were the best. The one after Liverpool beat Arsenal in the Champions League quarter-final in 2008 when he compared Wenger to John Cleese was the last genuine prime time Dunphy moment. He’s been slowing down ever since, the energy and the vitriol have declined with age.
He had basically given up at WC2018.
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He was laughing at himself at times as his analysis was so bad.
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