Shame On Our Shaman Eamon

Eamon, Eamon, Eamon. I would like to point out that amongst the audience for televised international football there are the odd few souls who possess some degree of mental competence. This is a fact that you have either forgotten or were never aware of in the first place. Not all football fans think, for example, that entering Dustin the Turkey in the Eurovision Song Contest was a hilarious thing to do.

Let me assure you that there are people out there who have well calibrated Bullshit Radars and that you have been a permanent blip on them for a good number of years now. We had come to terms with you though, accepted you as an unpleasant but unavoidable fact of life because out there somewhere, somehow you had a constituency, a captive audience and we were not so churlish as to seek to deny them their kicks. Our very own Bruce Forsyth.

Only now it has come to a head, the most patient of us can no longer withstand the relentless onslaught of slurry you unleash every time you are given a platform. It’s over Eamon and it’s not me it’s you.

When Giovanni Trapattoni was appointed Ireland manager Eamon hailed it as one the greatest days in Irish sporting history. Now someone such as myself who has a keen interest in sport but would by no means be considered an expert welcomed the appointment of such a successful and high profile manager. My enthusiasm was qualified, however, by the knowledge that Trap’s half dozen or so Italian League titles amongst other successes had come via fairly dour, formulaic football. I was aware of this. I am not an expert.

I would have thought it reasonable to expect a man who has held down a job as the nation’s premier pundit for the last generation to also know this. Apparently I was mistaken. Because the tactics that Trapattoni subsequently employed in his first few games as Ireland manager came like a bolt from the blue to Eamon. He was appalled.

Now a there are a couple of possibilities as to what happened here. (1) Eamon was not adequately familiar with Trap’s track record to know that this is what we were going to get or (2) He was familiar with Trap’s track record but was convinced that once he arrived and got a few pints of stout into him he would chill out and change the habits of fifty five years in football. In either case it is apparent that Dinny from Glenroe is more qualified to be on the RTE panel with Giles and Whelan.

On Wednesday night Ireland produced their best performance in years, a performance that was born out of a precise tactical approach and bold substitutions at the appropriate times. In other words astute management. Such shrewdness was dismissed by Eamon as nothing more than gambling, he poured scorn on the changes made and generally called every aspect of the manager’s competence into question. He seemed particularly irked that Trapattoni could replace an ineffective Kevin Doyle with Noel Hunt having never seen the Waterford man play competitively live. Eamon has never seen Noel Hunt play live either. If Trapattoni is not qualified to know whether Noel Hunt should come into the game on the basis that he has never seen him play in the flesh then surely Eamon is similarly unqualified to claim that he should not.

Maybe it’s me, perhaps to subject his nonsense assertions, errant predictions and all round pitiful insights to any kind of analysis is to miss the point completely. The absence of consistency or logic could actually be what it is all about.

Have I gotten the wrong end of this Dunphy shtick? Could it be that it has nothing to do with football and is more about fusing pantomime and soap opera for bizarre comic effect? That would certainly explain a lot.

In future I will bear this possibility in mind when I tune in. I will try to enjoy the setting, designed to provoke maximum fake outrage and phoney indignation from the man himself. I will try to embrace the concoction of a set up where protagonists are encouraged to showcase their most box office traits and goad other participants into doing likewise. Cast your mind back to incidents where Dunphy tries to tease fireworks from Graeme Souness.

Where you have the construction of a set up designed to deliver a pre determined result; controversy, whilst removing the scope for any genuine insight or intelligence that could skew the desired outcome, you can only call it like you see it: Reality TV.

There is also a beautiful symbiosis at work here. Dunphy gets to keep up his profile by preaching to his choir; people who think Podge and Rodge is comedy and RTE gets three hours of cheaply produced, high rating, high ad revenue programming masquerading as sports coverage. Everybody’s happy.

Do you think John Giles knows he is a Reality TV star?