By Liam Horan
Tohill plumped for Kerry to win the All-Ireland. Paddy Heaney won’t be happy with him.
The flanks on the armchair rode a touch too high, creating a kind of squeezed effect for Des, but Fixtures & Fittings is hardly his bailiwick: on the whole, I thought he did very well.
His journalistic training and background stood to him. His first question to Christy Cooney and Paraic Duffy concerned amateurism – and Duffy’s comments last week – and it generated a surprising level of discomfort among the two Croke Park head honchos.
The programme will benefit from some rigour on the questioning front. Pat Spillane tended to ask closed questions, with the consequence of promoting an unnecessary and often unintended defensiveness in the interviewee.
Des didn’t impose on Duffy and Cooney with that question. He just asked it. He didn’t hammer it down their throats. In fact, he was quite gentle how he went about it.
But it worked simply because it was the right question. The whole area of managers getting paid is tricky territory for GAA officials, because everyone knows it’s going on: it is embarrassing at a time when players have been making noises about a slice of the TV revenue.
More time could have been devoted to the day’s games – the nostalgia element was perhaps over-played, as if they were trying to shoe-horn the entire 125 years into one night to get it out of the way. Some let the graphics guy down the back of the office, the fellow who hasn’t seen sunlight for three or four years, away with murder too, with some of the links lasting for what seemed like hours.
Ambrose O’Donovan and John Fenton, the Centenary Year captains, was a solid pair of guests in the studio. The hurling and football groups captured in a hotel room somewhere for interviews with Michael Lyster and Marty Morrissey were too unwieldy to really work in the short amount of time allocated: perhaps it might be better to get Dermot Earley, for example, for a proper ten-minute on his own, rather than bulking so many together at the one time.
On the whole, though, we’d be given the new Des-driven show the thumbs up. It wasn’t exactly a searching test of the new format, of course, with two relatively low-key games. The tests will come down the line, when star players are sent off, particularly involved pundits from competing counties.
On that theme, Anthony Tohill remains incurably parochial. For the life of him, he couldn’t see how Anthony Davis would see his Derry as potential Ulster champions. How about two league final appearances in two years, Anthony, with victory in one of them? Surely not such a ridiculous thought that they would tack on an Ulster title? c5202300-d2bd-44ae-879a-1ba44f71cd30|4|3.8
