#3 - Eamon Dunphy's earpiece
On the importance of football commentary, and getting sworn at by Ryle Nugent
“[E]mbarrassingly truncated and hilariously silent”. The Guardian’s review of the ersatz not-Match of the Day highlights package broadcast by the BBC on Saturday night. bizarre theme tune-free, commentator-free, pundit-free edition of Match of the Day broadcast by the BBC on Saturday night.
And they’re right. Watching football without a commentator is weird and unsettling. Love them or hate them, commentators are as essential to watching football on your couch as the crowd and the footballers themselves. Obviously the whole thing wouldn’t happen without the latter, and the pandemic-era games in quiet, empty stadiums showed what an odd, aseptic experience football is without a crowd soundtracking the action. But take the commentators away and that’s all your left with.
No prompts, no context, no ex-pros spouting banalities about bottle, no annoying little facts they’ve just been bursting to say ever since they wrote them into their game notes. All you’ve got to go on is the ebb and flow of crowd noise, and everyone knows a stadium full of football fans is an unreliable narrator. Football without the commentator is a little like a Greek tragedy without the chorus, or Friends with the laughter track removed. Commentary enriches what you’re watching, and at its best becomes as memorable as the goal it is describing. You can’t tell me that Dennis Bergkamp’s goal against Argentina in 1998 is not improved by the manic and delirious recitation of the footballer’s by a hysterical Dutch commentator. George Hamilton intoning “The nation holds its breath” as David O’Leary lines up for his penalty against Romania in 1990 - an event that occurred before I had even reached football sentience but the rewatching - still provokes a lump in my throat and a glistening of the eyes.
When I was younger, I’d always thought the commentators who covered the games for the Irish broadcaster RTE were in the stadium. I’d never actually entertained the notion that these men, whose voices I knew as well or better than some of my own family members, could do their jobs remotely in a little box room in a Dublin suburb. It only took a Saturday spent at RTE’s HQ for me to be disabused of this naivety.
George Hamilton’s leather jacket
As part of a required two weeks of work experience while in fourth year of secondary school (an optional, transition year in the Irish system), my dad had secured me a week helping out in the RTE sports department, Wednesday to Sunday because of the backloading of sporting events at the weekend. This was, I was sure, going to be my first step on an inevitable journey to sports journalism stardom. Instead, it ended up with me sitting around with two Dublin lads - all “deadly” and intimidating big city attitudes - in the sports office watching a lot of sport on the big banks of cathode ray TVs mounted on the wall, and asking if there was anything we could help with.
To get us out from under their feet, the sports department allowed us out to roam the compound. So we ate and spotted minor celebrities in the canteen, we walked through some of the dormant sets, we pretended to wait for the bus on the main street in Carrickstown, and we sat in the control room for a live broadcast of the one o’clock news. I even passed Marty Morrissey in the hallway one day, though it had to be pointed out to me that it was in fact Marty Morrissey, and then explained to me who Marty Morrissey was.
There was some work for us to do. In a room off to the side of the main office there was an editing suite, where you could take a VHS tape from the archive, stick it in, and watch whatever match was recorded on it. Sometimes they’d ask us to log events in a game, so we’d wind and rewind the tape to count the fouls and the offsides and the free kicks. Other times we could just pick out a tape from the archives in the basement and spend a couple of hours watching grainy Total Football.
But everything that week was leading up to Saturday, when the big names would descend on Montrose to prepare for the Saturday evening broadcast of RTE’s premiership highlights show. That’s how I came face to face with George Hamilton in a cool dad leather jacket. It’s how I ended up in a conversation with a shell-suited John Giles about Cork City’s fortunes in the League of Ireland that year, Giles just as much the avuncular inner-city Dublin grandfather as my own grandfather was, if a lot shorter.
“Tommy Booowwweeee!!!!
While we were all sitting around watching the day’s games on the TVs, word went around the office that Giles’ foil and good friend Eamon Dunphy had arrived somewhere in the building. And there was, apparently, a problem. Dunphy’s earpiece for the night’s broadcast wasn’t working. Or it didn’t fit right. Either way, there was a problem, and a problem meant a grumpy Dunphy. Eamon Dunphy was for me, at that time, just another piece of the cultural furniture, like Giles and Bill O’Herlihy, Pat Kenny and Marian Finucane. Names and voices I recognised but whose backstory I didn’t know. This was Dunphy pre-Saipan, before his “tired and emotional” appearance during that year’s World Cup, and before I’d read his memoir of time playing - or not playing - in the lower leagues for Millwall in the 1970s. To be honest, I probably knew him best through Gary Cooke’s impression for Aprés Match.
If I cowed in the presence of his partner in crime John Giles, I knew if I was actually brought face to face with an irate Dunphy, I probably would have dissembled into a puddle of shy embarrassment. I was spared that indignity by the malfunctioning earpiece, and instead spent time talking about who was going to win the league with a tall, slender man whose face I didn’t recognise and whose voice I couldn’t quite place. Before the day’s games started he escaped elsewhere, and before long we could hear shouts and exclamations drifting down the corridor from the direction he had gone. He was, I was subsequently told, Gabriel Egan, one of RTE’s long-term football commentators, busy recording his commentary for the day’s big game (don’t ask me which), hunched over a small screen the live feed and shouting into a microphone while the crowd noise were premiership game were pumped into a dark box room somewhere on the RTE estate. It was not the glamorous idea I’d had of the life of a football commentator.
Throughout the game we could hear him and his colleagues down the hall, their cadence quickening and slowing with the pace of the game. When they finished our office slowly cleared out as people went off for make-up and prep work before the broadcast. We were left alone with Ryle Nugent, whose words would later become inextricably linked to another piece of Irish sporting history, albeit it in rugby. Maybe with all the hanging around of the day Nugent had absorbed some of Dunphy’s impatience. Because at one point in the late-afternoon a phone rang in the office. We three interns looked at each other blankly, unsure of whether it was in our remit to pick it up. After a few more rings Nugent, barely looking up from whatever he was scribbling at his desk, turned to us and said: “The phone won’t fucking answer itself.” Or, he said: “Is anyone going to get the fucking phone?” 23 years later my memory’s a little foggy, but there was definitely a “fuck” in there somewhere. We didn’t answer the phone, and it rang out.
The next day was the comedown. Sunday on Paddy’s weekend. Nothing doing. Which is at the very least odd, given that was usually the day of the GAA club football final. But I didn’t know that then, and I didn’t really care. We knocked off early and I got the bus into the city centre, and I was still thinking about those men sitting in their little rooms shouting into their microphones and watching the football. Do you know what? I take back my words - it was glamorous. Properly fucking glamorous.
What I’ve been reading: When in doubt about what to think about a scandal in football, read Barney Ronay.
What I’ve been watching: it’s a commentator’s cliché to call a game a rollercoaster, but the battle of the Unions in Berlin last Thursday that ended 3-3 certainly was that. Royale Union Saint-Gilloise and 1. FC Union Berlin return to Brussels this Thursday for the second leg. More on that anon.