At home with... Eamon Dunphy

Home, for this nation’s pre-eminent sporting pundit, is a stunningly impressive, recently-restored old terraced Georgian house in Ranelagh. It’s quite a sight from the outside, and equally splendid within. Immediately to the right of the imposing hall is Eamon’s living room, which doubles as an office. It’s here that the ex-Millwall playmaker, social commentator and inveterate controversialist cranks out his work (in longhand!).
While by no means unkempt, the room has a pleasantly lived-in quality, is thick with cigarette smoke, and is awash with sporting literature, newspaper sports supplements, and books of every description. You name it, it’s here: Kingsley Amis, Piers Morgan, Patrick Kavanagh, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Daire Whelan’s Who Stole Our Game? (a requiem for Irish domestic football), W.H. Auden, the obligatory Oxford English Dictionary and – yes, folks! – Olaf Tyaransen’s Palace of Wisdom. Eamon is one of the judging panel for the Sports Book of the Year award, a gig which – for all its obvious appeal – also obliges him to trawl through such mind-numbing pabulum as Eddie Jordan’s autobiography, surely a fate worse than marriage or death. But hey, someone’s got to do it. His current reading is a tome entitled Fateful Choices: The Decisions That Changed The World, a look at the more far-reaching and ill-fated decisions in human history, which curiously omits to mention the FAI’s recruitment of Steve Staunton as national team manager.
On the week that’s in it, Eamon’s still lamenting the catastrophic saga of the Republic’s descent into football hell, and seems utterly bereft of hope that the FAI will be able to effect any significant improvement.
“It’s anybody’s guess," he says. "You wouldn’t know what they’ll do. I wouldn’t have any confidence in them at all. Their first thought will be, 'What PR package can we fob the public off with?' They have no track record of doing the right thing. Their last three appointments have all been wrong appointments, so I wouldn’t hold my breath that they’ll get it right this time. What they want is someone who’ll wash with the public, who’s cheap and will basically be a yes man. If he fits those criteria, they’ll be happy to appoint him. Nothing to do with whether he can organise a team, has good ideas tactically, can get the most out of his players. Their priority is to save a few quid. If you look at the last 30 years, we had one manager who did an OK job – Jack Charlton, and I’d say he was a relative failure taking into account the talent at his disposal. And the three managers after him weren’t very good at all. And even Charlton was a mistake – they didn’t want him, they were after Bob Paisley, but they couldn’t fix the vote properly. Jack got three votes out of 18 on the first ballot. It’s not very inspiring. I’m afraid there’s no cause to be optimistic.”
Eamon hasn’t totally made his mind up who he wants to get the job, but has a couple of ideas. “There are people out there who’d interest me," he says. “Paul Jewell is one, George Graham is another. They’d be people I highly regard. Roy Keane wouldn’t touch the FAI with a barge pole, and I don’t think they’re too fond of him either. Dave O’Leary has a patchy record, but at least he has some experience, and in that sense he’d be an improvement on Staunton. Dozens of candidates have been mentioned, and at this stage it’s all very speculative.”
While Eamon has spoken highly of FAI chief executive John Delaney in the past, he’s under no illusions about the man’s culpability in this instance: “He’s responsible for the appointment, so certainly the buck should stop with him. He’s the chief executive. He was blatantly trying to distance himself from Staunton’s appointment, and it wasn’t big or clever. Everyone knows he was responsible for firing Kerr, and he was the key figure in appointing Staunton. They only conducted one interview. If he doesn’t put it right, he’s in trouble. He’s the one who promised a world-class management team, and he didn’t deliver anything like it. This time, he’s got to get it right, and if he doesn’t, his own position will be in serious jeopardy. Trying to wash his hands of the appointment – that wasn’t classy, and it won’t have escaped the notice of the other board members. He’s a politician. There was a three-man committee, but it was Delaney’s call.”
Despite some compelling evidence to the contrary, Eamon regards the current crop of Irish players as ‘outstanding’ and feels we’re being sold short: “I’m of the opinion that we have a squad of players who are good enough to compete in European and World Cup final tournaments, and be contenders. We have Shay Given, Richard Dunne, Steve Finnan, Robbie Keane, Kevin Doyle, Stephen Hunt, all top players. We have lots of outstanding players, and we have some good young players coming through. I think we should be competitive. Poland are top of their group and they don’t have top-level players. Scotland have kept pace with France and Italy, and they don’t have a whole lot to work with either. Greece won Euro 2004. Turkey and South Korea made the semi-finals of the World Cup. If you organise an international team properly, there’s so much that can be achieved. We should have qualified from this group: there were no great teams there. There was no excuse not to be competitive, and acquit ourselves well.”
After decades on the front line of football punditry, Eamon’s love for the game shows no sign of turning stale – “I’ve never, ever gone through a stage of even slightly losing interest in football. I’m as wrapped up in it as any eight-year-old kid. Sure, there’s things about the modern game that irritate me. I don’t like the cheating, and there’s a lot of poor refereeing which could be instantly solved with video technology. The diving is deplorable, but again, that could be stamped out – just review it on video on the Monday morning and punish the people responsible. It’s the simplest thing in the world.”

Photos by Mick Quinn.