It is significant that the thing most frequently said about Gay Byrne’s broadcasting style, by himself and by others, is that he asks the questions that the audience at home would want to ask but wouldn’t dare. His achievement is founded on Irish people’s inarticulacy, embarrassment and silence, on speaking for us because we were – and to a degree still are – afraid to speak for ourselves.
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Fintan O’Toole, The Lie of the Land
I
The Sunday Game once fulfilled a role similar to that of Gay Byrne’s Late Late Show. Only, instead of asking questions it provided the answers.
Often conflicting answers, admittedly, this only served the show’s broad appeal. Viewers anticipated that their instinctual take on an incident or performance would be vindicated in the discussion of panellists who thrived on discord.
Where one week Pat Spillane’s pomposity might sting your support for an unfancied team doing things differently, Joe Brolly was there to justify your inclination. When the following week Brolly’s indignation concerned a topic you cared little about, a witty remark from Colm O’Rourke mirrored your detachment.
On those occasions where the three leading football panellists were at odds with your outlook, Michael Lyster could be relied upon to at least hint at an alternative view.
In the more scaled back world of inter-county hurling, the panel (whatever its make-up) tended to strike a more joyous note at what they were witnessing. Yes, there were disagreements, but hurling was most often celebrated as the winner and the sincerity of this momentary excitement was gripping.
The whole thing then was of vital importance and no importance at all. During what many consider to have been The Sunday Game’s heyday, it cultivated an environment in which words had meaning but no lasting consequences.
Although the games have always been of great interest, the success of that era owed a great deal to the show’s understanding of the bigger picture. Matches come and go, and even an All-Ireland final is only ever a game that comes before the next one.
Particularly, Lyster, Brolly, O’Rourke and Spillane remain vibrant in the collective consciousness of Gaelic football watchers because they were often more memorable than the games themselves. As O’Toole wrote of The Late Late Show under Gay Byrne, so too can we apply the same guiding logic to The Sunday Game of this period: “Anyone can speak so long as they speak entertainingly enough.”
II
In one of his recent columns concerning RTÉ’s GAA coverage, Eamonn Sweeney argued that The Sunday Game has become homogenised and bland. GAA pundits “need to realise that avoiding criticism doesn’t constitute success,” he wrote in the Sunday Independent. “It can even be a form of failure.”
There is no question that the show has lost its appeal. Previously, the prospect of a less entertaining game was almost more exciting than a brilliant one for what the pundits might say about it at the mid-way point or at full-time.
And while it isn’t the case exactly that the current panel will try to explain that you’re actually watching a brilliant match irrespective of what’s in front of you, there is a greater level of restraint in their discussions, nevertheless.
It always felt like Brolly, O’Rourke and Spillane’s loyalty was to GAA first, and RTÉ second. If they believed the former needed defending for some reason or other, it scarcely seemed to matter that the latter was providing them a platform to defend it.
Last weekend, after the show’s current host Joanne Cantwell and prominent hurling pundit Dónal Óg Cusack went back-and-forth on the latter’s comments about the Tailteann Cup, Sweeney insisted that this kind of standoff is not what is needed either.
“We’re looking for thought-provoking debate,” he claimed, “not a WWE style grudge match.”
For whatever portion of the watching public that shares Sweeney’s assessment of the show’s shortcomings, the crux of their argument is this: It is no longer entertaining.
III
Most viewers of The Sunday Game may never have seen RTÉ’s head of sport before Declan McBennett appeared on the Six One news recently to discuss GAAGO and the allocation of broadcasting rights. Nevertheless, McBennett has overseen wholesale changes to RTÉ’s catalogue of sporting pundits since his appointment in April 2018 – most noticeably in GAA.
“I think the game now is fundamentally different to the game that some of the analysts played,” he told Gaelic Life shortly after taking up the role. “The principles are the same, it’s still about putting the ball over the bar or in the net, but the tactical exchanges are now fundamentally different and we have to reflect that.”
Rather than lay the blame squarely at McBennett’s door, however, Sweeney argues that the powerbrokers at RTÉ likely had their issues with some of what their GAA analysts said – or how they said it – before the current head of sport came along.
“Past panellists were strong enough to… make their point anyway,” he insisted, the modern timidity of Sunday Game contributors more frustrating to him than the expected cautiousness of the man upstairs.
Sweeney allows for the possibility that the current generation of pundits are more concerned with the possibility of social media abuse than their predecessors. Thus, they are understandably less inclined to speak fearlessly.
It is an interesting factor almost impossible to discern one way or the other.
On the one hand, a viral moment captured on The Sunday Game and seeded on Twitter, Facebook, Tik Tok or Instagram guarantees nationwide attention for those at the centre of it. On the other, it is not as if GAA pundits appearing on platforms other than RTÉ are speaking in a vacuum.
All-Ireland winning Galway goalkeeper James Skehill amassed tens of thousands of views earlier this year for his unsparing criticism of Davy Fitzgerald on Off The Ball’s Hurling Pod. Oisin McConville and Paul Flynn did likewise after a disagreement about Dublin’s footballers on the paywalled Second Captains podcast was cut and shared online.
The always outspoken former Laois footballer Colm Parkinson has built something genuinely impressive in his subscriber-based Smaller Fish podcast, while the proliferation of other successful GAA podcasts across the country hints at an insatiable appetite for honest, analytical and entertaining coverage.
In an age when the variety of available GAA coverage has never been so strong, The Sunday Game’s struggles are both surprising and, perhaps, entirely understandable.
IV
Fintan O’Toole was writing about Gay Byrne a full decade before his eventual departure from The Late Late Show in 1999. Aside from Byrne’s guiding concern for the show’s entertainment value, O’Toole heralded his temerity in providing a platform for people to share unspeakable things.
Messages Byrne received from his television viewers and radio listeners could reveal stories of incredible cruelty, remarkable naivety or crippling loneliness. Without question, these correspondences were entertaining in their own curious way.
“But at his best he has helped us share in the sorrow,” wrote O’Toole, “as indeed we should.”
Imagining a day where Byrne’s services may no longer be required, O’Toole wondered whether a day might come “when we can hear our intimacies in a voice that doesn’t come from the radio, [when we] can speak to each other in tones other than Gay Byrne’s.”
If this point had been reached by the time Byrne stepped away from The Late Late Show is uncertain, but things had unquestionably changed across his 37-year stint at the helm.
Much and all as Eamonn Sweeney and others may lament the loss of Brolly, O’Rourke, Spillane et al from The Sunday Game then, I believe there is an implicit unwillingness to acknowledge the wider world of GAA coverage in that outlook.
For the passing viewer on a Sunday afternoon, an argument about Sean Cavanagh’s manhood or the damage Donegal are doing to Gaelic football will always offer greater entertainment value than a more sober discussion on some facet of the play.
Although neither extreme is without issue, there is no debate about what is the more attractive prospect. RTÉ’s evident desire to do away with “personal attacks” as McBennett termed them in that Gaelic Life interview has led to an overcorrection. Pundits will typically refrain now from criticising individuals and focus instead on what can be comfortably talked about: the games.
Truthfully, I am not sure that this method can be any more successful than the previous approach would be in this current era, however. Even if RTÉ threw the shackles off and encouraged a new era of pundits to do and say what they felt was right, The Sunday Game no longer holds the singular authority it did in the pre-podcast era.
For fans of Gaelic football or hurling, the lengthier discussions now available on podcasts offer greater scope to adequately cover the games. And unlike The Sunday Game, most cannot rely on an automatic audience so their output requires contributors to be soberly informed and entertaining. It is never a case of either/or.
Viewers once relied on The Sunday Game for answers as they did on Gay Byrne and his Late Late Show to ask questions. For the former, the role has been reversed. The show tends to leave us with more questions than anything else.
Prize entertainment over analysis and the more discernible watching public will not take you seriously (and for all their entertainment value, Brolly, O’Rourke, Spillane et al were certainly taken seriously in their time). Prioritise analysis over entertainment and you end up where The Sunday Game is now being roundly scorned week after week.