LAST WEEKEND’S SUNDAY Game saw Martin McHugh give a particularly incendiary soundbite when he labelled Colm Cooper a “two trick pony” (best from the comment section- “What’s his two tricks? Scoring goals and scoring points?”).
McHugh has since rowed back from his comment at a pace that Steve Redgrave would be proud of but his starting point was saying that James O’Donoghue was a better footballer than Cooper.
It got us thinking about other times where pundits have tried to be so clever with a point that they ended up saying something that made people lose their minds. Here are five of our favourites*:
*I’m aware of the absence of a certain RTÉ rugby pundit but there were just too many to choose from, otherwise it would have been an archive rather than a taster*
Stephen Jones – O’Driscoll wouldn’t be in my Lions test team
That point wouldn’t have been as far fetched during the 2013 tour but Jones wrote that during a Sunday Times round table before the the tour of South Africa after Ireland had won the Grand Slam and O’Driscoll had won player of the tournament. O’Driscoll went on to have a cracking tour that culminated in this hit, which was lauded at the time but likely would have got him a ban today.
Didi Hamann- “Yaya Toure is a liability”
Hamann’s point was technically correct — Toure is a liability in a defensive sense. But when you throw that word around about a player who bags 20-plus goals, then people are going to latch onto it rather than the point. And there was a lot of latching, with people mixed on whether Hamann was right.
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Bill O’Herlihy- “David Moyes has seen 39,432 players over a total of five million times.”
I feel a little cruel interrupting Bill’s retirement with a reminder of this, but it was just too brilliant to leave out. Bill always loved to refer to the Guardian to, perhaps, show that he was up to date with some the top football journalists. Unfortunately, he was taken in by a joke stat in one of the columns. In his defence, Moyes had seen Fellaini that many times, yet still thought he was worth £27.5 million.
Joe Brolly- Gooch is a choker
The best thing you can say about Brolly’s column about Colm Cooper is that unlike Martin McHugh, at least Brolly said it in a year where Cooper was actually playing. Brolly said Cooper never played well against Tyrone before saying “An American tourist would never have believed it if you’d told him The Gooch was one of the greats. If however you’d told him he was a choker, he would have agreed, since that is what Colm did against Cross.”
There was a huge backlash against Brolly’s comments and eventually there was a Frost/Nixon showdown between him and Martin Carney on the Sunday Game.
Eamon Dunphy- Bayern Munich are not a top European team
13 March,2013 was a blockbuster day for Dunphy in terms of knee jerking. There was the above comment, made at a time when Bayern was running away with the Bundesliga and on course for a European Cup win. He also said “Brazil have no players you would really covet” and rubbished Arsenal’s young gun “Alex Oxford-Chamberlain”. They are just some of Dunphy’s many lines over his career, and we gathered some of them here to mark his birthday.
This was from a few weeks later after Bayern had actually won the Champions League. What would he have said if they lost?
What are you favourite pundit knee jerks over the years? Surely there are a few that still make your blood boil?
