Second Captain, First Captain, whatever…
A few weeks’ back, former Mayo footballer Ciaran McDonald was the special guest on Second Captains Live.
Being a GAA nut from Mayo, this was obviously a massive deal to me and like-minded people from my county, but it was also a great source of pride to see that other pockets of the country were similarly excited about the appearance of McDonald, one of the great cult icons of Gaelic Football’s modern era.
In case you didn’t know, McDonald’s public appearances are exceedingly rare.
Nobody so well-known in Irish sport has managed to remain so anonymous; he is the JD Salinger of the GAA world.
For the purpose of illustration, even though I hail from Mayo, before his Second Captains appearance, I had only heard McDonald speak on two occasions.
The first time was when I shared a field with him (to say I played against him would be far too generous a description) in a club championship encounter in the mid-2000s.
The second was when he was interviewed ahead of the Mayo v Dublin All-Ireland semi-final in 2012 on Off the Ball on Newstalk, when Eoin McDevitt, Ken Early and Ciaran Murphy were still anchoring the show before their high-profile departure from the station in 2013.
So it was a big deal to have him on live television last month and expectations ahead of the interview were quite high.
The audience wasn’t disappointed.
It was fascinating to hear an almost painfully shy and humble McDonald talk about his role in Mayo teams that went so close to landing an All-Ireland, to hear what he thought of the public’s perception of him and to discover that he still has a child-like love for the game.
Minutes later, the footage of a local commentator responding to each of McDonald’s 11 (yes, 11) points in a recent club encounter with the same ‘McDonald a shot, McDonald a point’ line was a perfect illustration of how the show uses archive footage to great effect.
The McDonald interview was a microcosm of what makes the show so great and so popular; that seamless mixture of compelling sporting discussion and light relief.
In the last show of the series earlier this week, for example, Eoin, Ken and the three panel guests – Bernard Dunne, Eamon McGee and Richie Sadlier – discussed the moral dilemma presented by last weekend’s Mayweather v Pacquiao fight.
Richie Sadlier: "I wouldn't be looking to anyone in Las Vegas for moral guidance." Brilliant.
— Second Captains (@SecondCaptains) May 6, 2015
Billed as the ‘fight of the century,’ it also required, as McGee pointed out, customers to put money directly into the pocket of a man who has a horrendous history of abuse towards women and whose actions have been met with little or no censure from the sport’s authorities.
It was a very interesting discussion and yet, when it was finished, the show immediately switched to the latest episode of Boring Irish Sporting Tweets with Roddy Collins, one of the many regular segments – Skills of Hurling and Degrading Irish Superstars Action also deserve honourable mentions – that work so well.
Better yet, it didn’t seem at all strange that something so ridiculous (and hilarious) could follow such a serious issue without skipping a beat.
That has been the way of things for the entirety of this series and it has worked a treat.
A discussion on concussion, for example, or sexuality in sport, could easily be followed by an analysis of Pat Spillane’s magnificent farmer’s tan on Superstars or my personal highlight of this season, the sketch on Trevor Giles’ famous sleeveless Meath Kepak jersey.
Every episode has the hook of a high-profile interview and even though time is often limited, they nearly always provide a nugget of information about the guest that you’ve never heard before or their thoughts on a topic that they’ve never previously explored.
Even the famous Good Wall offers a insight into what Ireland’s best-known and most successful sports stars think of their peers in other codes.
As a GAA man, for example, it warmed my heart to see someone as feted as Brian O’Driscoll choosing Colm Cooper to take a place alongside BOD himself, Padraig Harrington and some of the country’s all-time sporting heroes.
The big-name interviews provide the show with an extra level of gravitas on a weekly basis.
The interview, though, is a cog in an well-oiled machine that has a perfect mix of serious sporting discussion, laughter and an indulgence in Irish sporting nostalgia that the show has tapped into so expertly in the last couple of years.
It combines the sporting heft you’d expect of an ESPN 30 for 30 documentary with the level of humour you’d expect from a show that appears, to me at least, to have been an obvious influence, Baddiel and Skinner’s Fantasy Football League.
Such is the reputation that the team behind Second Captains have carved out in Irish sporting circles after a decade or so of hard work that they can command the stars and that the stars actually want to come to them, whether it be one-off guests like O’Driscoll, Harrington, Brady etc. or regular contributors like Shane Curran, Richie Sadlier and David O’Doherty.
@SecondCaptains nobody remembers the time I was up there :(((( pic.twitter.com/UBY2QxU0Jc
— David O'Doherty (@phlaimeaux) May 6, 2015
The lads too, however, have become stars in their own right and the biggest compliment you could pay them is that viewers are tuning into see Eoin, Ken and Murph as much as they are to see *sporting cliche alert* your Andy Lees, your Ciaran McDonalds and your Brian O’Driscolls.
Credit must go too, to the other members of the Second Captains team, Mark Horgan and (the often half-naked) Simon Hick, for keeping the show running so smoothly behind the scenes.
The transition from radio and podcasting to TV hasn’t been entirely seamless and there was evidence of a few minor teething problems at the start as they came to grips with a competely different medium way out of their comfort zone.
It didn’t take long to adapt and just as they were the best thing for an Irish sports fan to listen to on the wireless (and still are on their podcast), in a short space of time, they have become the best thing for an Irish sports fan to watch on the small screen.
To put a twist on a now famous Joe Duffy line, they’ve never seemed more at home, those boys.
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