Sport

Brendan Crossan: A genuine pity Joe Brolly won't be banging the drum against GAA pay walls

Joe Brolly was a fixture with The Sunday Game for almost 20 years. He will now work as a pundit for eir Sport
Joe Brolly was a fixture with The Sunday Game for almost 20 years. He will now work as a pundit for eir Sport Joe Brolly was a fixture with The Sunday Game for almost 20 years. He will now work as a pundit for eir Sport

NOBODY holds court quite like Joe Brolly. At Wednesday’s eir Sport National League launch up on the sixth floor of Croke Park, Joe swooned over to the reserved chair to explain to reporters why he decided to go to the ‘dark side’ and join the pay-per-view movement.

Amid the fluffy croissants, platters of fruit and coffee on offer, Dublin’s Paul Mannion, Kerry's Paul Geaney, Cork’s Alan Cadogan and Wexford’s Rory O’Connor were also available for interview.

There was a weighty turn-out from the media. If you'd asked each of them who they wanted to interview first, Brolly would have topped the pile.

For our group Mannion was up first. It was a good interview. Better than any of us expected.

The Kilmacud Crokes man talked about Jim Gavin's legacy, pushing on for six-in-a-row and why his conscience made him become a vegan.

But you sensed that even Mannion knew Brolly was the star attraction, to the point where he tried to listen in on the Derry man's interview while sipping his water.

Rory O'Connor and Alan Cadogan also eavesdropped behind Brolly while he held court.

Joe spoke with print reporters for 37 minutes. At times during the interview he was genuinely hilarious.

A huge fan of David Clifford, Joe said the young Kerry forward was a “complete football machine” and laughed at the audacity of the 20-year-old “rocking up to the Allstars in a polo neck. Is that what you call them in the Free State or is it a turtle neck? I mean, he rocked up wearing a f***ing polo neck.”

He also bitterly recalled Clifford’s one-man destruction of the Derry minors in the 2017 All-Ireland final.

“For his first goal, it was like bouncers trying to throw Jean-Claude Van Damme out of a f***ing disco.”

You could tell he was deeply hurt by the way in which his RTE exit was handled.

“I was very annoyed about it,” he said. “Like, I’m a big boy. You know, 20 years, being such a strong part of the public conversation. And then there wasn’t even a … I didn’t even get a f***king clock!”

There has always been a touch of anarchy about the Dungiven man. You don’t know what he’s going to say next.

He was also honest enough to say that he loves being part of the public conversation. When he was axed/contract not renewed by RTE (delete as appropriate), his role in that conversation would undoubtedly be curtailed.

But nobody expected him to pop up on a pay-per-view TV channel. For years, he was vehemently opposed to the GAA’s move to embrace pay walls.

The lure of TV was simply too great to resist, as he acknowledged: “I have to say, I love the public conversation, and that’s a big part of it as well – the idea of being hooked in.

“I love the telly, I’ve always loved the telly. When I sit down and they put the mic on and go, ‘five, four, I feel excited, you know.”

Joe was prepared to ditch his anti-pay-per-view stance, he said, because he was fed up howling at the moon and that he didn’t want to become irrelevant.

“That [pay-per-view] train had left the station,” he said.

Former socialist Billy Connolly once said he was “fed up being wrong all of my life because the people had rejected socialism” as a political concept and that it was a “stupid intellectual point to push it any further”.

Maybe the Scottish comedian didn’t want to be howling at the moon for the rest of his life either.

Of course, it didn’t stop the likes of British parliamentarians Tony Benn and Denis Skinner from howling at the moon.

And what’s wrong with howling at the moon when you believe you’re absolutely and morally right?

Why would you want to change course, be a dead fish and go with the flow in order to be relevant?

For years Benn and Skinner railed against the ravaging effects of capitalism.

Just because they were in a minority they lost none of their socialist zeal.

For many people, Benn and Skinner’s worldview made a lot of sense to a lot of people, even when Maggie Thatcher was preaching the gospel of: ‘Ask not what you can do for your country, but what you can do for yourself.’

Of course, let’s not get carried away here. We’re not talking about social inequality and the explosion of homelessness and food banks.

We’re talking about an anti-pay-per-view GAA pundit moving to a pay-per-view TV channel. It’s hardly a mortal sin.

Nevertheless, it was still a principle worth fighting for. Joe Brolly is an influencer. We can see this in his charity work and how he’s made a difference in organ donation.

He’s fighting the good fight for cystic fibrosis sufferers and their families and he’s done a lot of fundraising for the Hospice in places such as Mayo and Roscommon.

That’s why it’s a genuine pity he’s no longer part of the anti-pay-per-view lobby within the GAA because it will always be an ideal worth pushing for; to show that the GAA is truly unique, that it is more than merely a sporting body and that pay walls should never darken its door.

It’s also a pity RTE Sport felt it had no choice other than to jettison Joe Brolly from The Sunday Game.

In footballing terms, he’s akin to the player who can win you a game. The skilful, slightly erratic playmaker.

He might say the wrong thing, he might be downright rude at times too, but was he really unmanageable?

It seems RTE were guilty of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. At least a huge swathe of the watching public thinks so.

He should still be banging the drum against pay walls in the GAA. But that train has now left the station. And that's the pity.