Читать книгу Notorious: The Maddest and Baddest Sportsmen on the Planet - Richard Bath - Страница 16

Although Marv Albert’s arse-biting and three-in-a-bed with a dominatrix probably wins him the gold medal for nutty behaviour by a commentator, epic Irish troublemaker Eamon Dunphy has devoted himself to giving marvellous Marvin a run for his money.

A pugnacious journeyman footballer in his day, the little Dubliner has established himself as the most outspoken pundit—gobshite in the local vernacular—on the Emerald Isle. From Italia ’90 onwards, when Jack Charlton’s Ireland football team was becoming the side no other wanted to meet, even famously beating Italy in the USA World Cup in 1994, Dunphy would incense fans by lambasting the national side for its lack of verve at every available opportunity. So vitriolic were his comments on the subject that Charlton would immediately leave a press conference if he arrived. Ireland’s football fans showed their anger in an equally unambiguous manner, mobbing his car in a Dublin street and then overturning it.

Still, Dunphy brought a lot on himself. During the 2002 World Cup, with Irish football in the midst of a row caused by his confidant Roy Keane’s acrimonious bust-up with manager Mick McCarthy, Dunphy went onto Irish television after another dire result, saying: ‘I want Irish soccer to fulfil its destiny. I want us to fail. I hoped that Cameroon would beat us, that Germany would beat us, and that we would go out of this tournament.’

He managed to survive the outcry over that little outburst, but he soon put his employers in an even more difficult situation. Neither the public nor the controllers of RTE, the Irish equivalent of the BBC, could believe it when Dunphy then turned up to commentate on the Japan-Russia game having had no sleep and with drink clearly taken. After stumbling through a couple of inanities at the start of the match and making no contribution while slumped in his chair, Dunphy slurred his way through the half-time analysis, and did not appear for the second half. Overwhelmed by 1,300 complaints, RTE sacked him on the spot.

Not that Dunphy reserves his ire for sportsmen or only falls out with fellas who kick a ball for a living. He even managed to become estranged from U2, whose manager, Paul McGuinness, remains one of his faithful drinking partners on his regular excursions to Dublin’s Horseshoe Bar and at the city’s trendiest nightclub, Lilly’s Bordello. Granted unfettered access to the supergroup for the book Unforgettable Fire: The Definitive Biography of U2,he failed to produce the expected hagiography, instead turning out a warts ’n’ all effort that had so many warts that only The Edge will now acknowledge him. Dunphy’s ghost-written autobiography of Keane was similarly incendiary: so lurid in fact, that Keane actually denied having made some of the most contentious revelations.

His high-profile radio talkback show and his column in a national Sunday newspaper regularly got him into even more hot water. Successfully sued on a ruinously regular basis, his high point came when Proinsias de Rossa, the then leader of the opposition, won a record £300,000 in damages from him.

Amusing one minute, acerbic the next (and often both simultaneously), Dunphy remains one of the highest-profile personalities in Ireland. Part of that is because he’s a maverick, part is because he can laugh at himself; when he was arrested for drink driving before getting off on a technicality, he quipped that ‘the problem with Dublin is that you can’t get good coke in this town’.