Rightly or wrongly, they’re two of the most reviled men in GAA. But not too many find them boring. The news that Ger Loughnane and Pat Spillane are resuming work as pundits on The Sunday Game is hardly an earth-shattering news story but it will certainly take some of the saccharine sweetness out of summer Sunday nights on the Montrose sofas.
Spillane’s numbing stint as anchor is over, thankfully. Although he made a fair fist at the tricky job of presenting, considering he had no experience of such work, it was obvious that he was painfully neutered in the role. His attempts to be balanced in his questioning often resulted in hyperactive and jumpy probing, which sometimes bordered on the ludicrous. He never quite mastered his own presence as presenter, and somehow you always saw him as a muzzled mouthpiece learning the ropes of being bland, rather than a cool anchor at his ease.
When he was in his malevolent pomp as the vicious pundit, Spillane says he used to receive weekly avalanches of hate mail, some of it simply addressed to (and reaching its destination as) “Pat Bollocks, Kerry”. Perhaps his most enduring and infamous flight was when he dismissed Tyrone’s mauling of Kerry in the 2003 All-Ireland semi-final as “puke football”, because of their use of ‘blanket defence’. Time has shown it to be a fairly ridiculous accusation, considering the same Tyrone team have gone on to win three All-Irelands since, playing a brand of rapid, counter-attacking football as good as anything any of the great Kerry teams have ever delivered.
But still, in one stinging polemic, Spillane created a moniker and argument that has cropped up time and time again in the last six years. Whether you agree or not, the words and the passion put an imprint on the collective consciousness. Surely that is the purpose of punditry, something that makes you sit up and take notice, whether it be to jump up in arms and throw things at the screen or to applaud like mad and shout ‘bravo!’. It’s better than nodding off beside the fire in dotage as Anthony Tohill or Paul Curran drone on and on, like the priest with the most boring voice in Ireland in the Father Ted lingerie store episode.
Loughnane’s return is arguably even more riveting. There is no more compelling figure in the modern world of GAA, barring his old college mate Brian Cody, albeit for a whole set of different reasons. Loughnane has been portrayed in the last few years as having spiralled into a descent of madness not seen since King Lear went rambling naked above on the heath but it’s far from the case. Loughnane is still the same slightly cracked genius he always was, no more mad but no less. His madness is nothing more than the same dark magic that so often underpins the work of the greatest men. You only need to think back to that crazy summer of 1995 and that sun-blistered touchline, and Marty Morrissey stopping him at half-time in the final, and the intense stare and the soaring delivery of “We’re going to do it!” to remember that Ger Loughnane is like no other.
He’s the same intense performer that won his county’s first hurling All-Star. The same magnetic animal that pulled Clare from the oblivion of perennial provincial embarrassment to the unconscionable heights of two All-Irelands, and most importantly, the same irreverent firebrand who has rubbed almost every hurling man outside and inside his county up the wrong way in the last few years. People might also quickly say he’s the same loser who mucked up his chance with Galway after promising the world. But that debacle has to be viewed in the right context. Had he not opened his mouth when he took over, his tenure there would not be seen as the failure it now is. And anyway, the vagaries of Galway hurling are too complex and multi-faceted to allow his time there to be seen in black and white.
Regardless of all that, most people now see him as an irrelevance, a man clinging to past glories and getting his kicks by chipping and gnawing away at people who are doing their best in the here and now. But he’s more relevant than ever. In the modern world of GAA analysis, more packaged, sanitised and cosmetic than ever before, a man like Loughnane is desperately needed. He might end up becoming more hated than ever, but that’s to be expected in the GAA when you speak your mind.
Talking too eloquently, being too blunt or critical or generally having a lot to say is not a popular strategy in the GAA. We want our heroes to be modest, self-effacing, harmless and ideally not able to string many sentences together, thank you. Being mouthy is something for the soccer lads, it’s something flash, kind of a foreign thing. That’s what irks so much about Loughnane and Spillane. They don’t give a damn about the conventions of what you say and what you don’t say. That doesn’t mean they get it right all the time, but that’s not what makes them unpopular. It’s having the neck to say certain things. People see them mouthing and no matter what comes out, it’s that classic Irish thing of thinking someone is getting above their station and cutting them down to size, it’s ‘Who does he think he is?’.
And that attitude is what has spawned modern GAA punditry. It has become the safest ship to sail there is. In today’s analysis lexicon, a smack of a hurl in the tingly area of a man’s anatomy (Tom Kenny on Cha Fitzpatrick) is an unfortunate by-product of that mysterious modern phenomenon that is the “white heat of Championship hurling”. The worst kind of cynical brutishness on the field is “a bit of argy-bargy”, and managers and players simply don’t make errors any more, any tactical or technical indiscretions are airbrushed over as “off-days”. Now, it’s natural in an amateur arena that you’re going to spare your game’s exponents some of the ire that their professional counterparts get, and deserve to get. That’s only fair, they’re not being paid after all. But there is a big difference between that kind of leeway and the Old Boy’s Club we have to endure every week.
That’s the essential problem. Too many of the men casting their opinions are too close to the players. They either played with them recently, managed them, or simply see them regularly as is normal in the small pools of Irish GAA communities. They are their friends. It’s what gives Spillane, and especially Loughnane the hunting licence that they use to such potent effect. They don’t have any friends, and if they do, they’re happy to lose them in a flash for one sharp, painful stab on the couch. The coward does it with a kiss, the brave man with a sword.