Love him or hate him, everyone watches him.
Joe Brolly is a special kind of pundit and yet, funnily enough in Ireland, there are plenty like him.
He’s opinionated, divisive, he’s controversial and, unfortunately for everyone who pretends like they wouldn’t turn him on the tele if they were forced to, they all hang off his every word, even if they’re only doing it to try and jump on a slip-up or, Christ, just to annoy themselves.
Brolly is unpredictable too. Colm O’Rourke told SportsJOE’s GAA Hour podcast last year that there aren’t many certainties with the Derry native, just that there will definitely be uncertainties.
“You see, Joe would be like the wind – it changes around very often,” O’Rourke said.
“Joe will change, we don’t have to worry about him. His principles are completely movable.”
But even amid the apparent flip-flopping, it never feels like Joe Brolly can never be nailed because he has a reliable and diverse playbook and he has contingency plans. If you study him long enough though, you’ll notice that there are some key pillars that hold up the fortress that is Joe Brolly’s bullet-proof punditry.
1. Someone in the crowd shouted…
Joe Brolly doesn’t need to survey the entire gallery, the voice behind him is always enough to provide a trustworthy population sample.
That angry roar from the crowd will generally set the tone for Joe’s agenda this week.
“Ah, would you kick the bloody thing in!” or something to that effect will have no doubt been met with the biggest cheer of the day and is cast-iron proof that everyone is fucked off with what the GAA has become.
Someone will also most likely have approached Joe, shook their head in humble acknowledgement and admitted to him, “Jesus, Joe, you were right”.
2. Gaels
Joe knows how to tug at the heart strings of the GAA folk and with one powerfully emotive word, he drags a sizable amount of the population along with him.
You don’t really need a strong argument when you peddle the ‘Gaels’ line. You see, he might dish out a fair bit of stick but he’s doing it in the interests of ‘good Gaels’.
If he says something like ‘this is the antithesis of everything Gaels are supposed to be’, he automatically has an association with everyone who would consider themselves good Gaels. No-one really knows exactly what a Gael is but they know what they definitely are not and they certainly know what they don’t stand for.
3. Tenuous analogy
Brolly is a creative and well-read soul and that is a both an effective and bonkers cocktail at times.
Whilst Pat Spillane likes to draw straight comparisons between counties and soccer teams, Joe takes a more scenic route and could pull anything from his pocket at any stage, even it means something reminding him of US marines or Robert Emmet’s Speech from the Dock.
He likes labelling football ‘war’. Teams must go to battle. They must bring bloody war and have absolute conviction in their ruthlessness.
He doesn’t, however, like when men drag other men to the ground in that war.
4. I met two players down the shops…
It is incredible, the profile of player that Joe Brolly just so happens to run into whilst he’s picking up groceries, stopped at traffic lights, or handing out leaflets at mass. It really is unbelievable. It’s not believable, like.
The maddest coincidence is that, just like the crowds in the stand, these players also come up to the Derry man and admit to him in private that they agree with everything he has said.
They will look “sheepish” and they will confide in the most influential broadcaster in Ireland just for the sake of it.
They can’t be named though.
5. Tell us about one of your mates who no-one knows
Whatever the opposite of name-dropping is, Joe Brolly is shameless at it.
He’ll have no qualms about recalling the story that Francie McNicholl’s sister told him and passing it on passionately to over a million people on live TV. If Bernie Mullan said it, then we all should be listening. Derek Mulholland: why shouldn’t the country know who he’s talking about?
Brolly’s a raconteur of the highest calibre but he never feels the need to adjust his parochial set for his RTÉ audience. If people in Kerry don’t know where the Ballymaguigan clubhouse is, then that’s their fault.
6. Hold on
There are three ways Brolly masterfully grabs the attention of everyone in the room:
- “Naw, hold on…”
- Point his finger and look over his glasses.
- Use the word ‘urgent’ generously.
He might not have anything coming after those effective tee-ups, but it is very damn exciting in that moment of suspense. Then it’s usually just some nonsense to do with Francie McNicholl being a proper Gael.
7. Whisper when you feel like it
Brolly often seems to just gets it into his head that he can’t be bothered projecting his voice any longer. He slouches back, rubs his hands together and speaks in a gravely low voice as if he was hiding in a bathroom cubicle calling outside for help.
8. Give up
Declare that you’re finished with the game because this not what good Gaels stand for. Repeat that after next week’s game.
Talk about the final straw, what you saw in an underage match on Thursday night and then, next week, talk about the final straw – what Francie McNicholl’s cousin-in-law heard roared in the stands.
9. Bar talk
If you tell people enough times that you want to analyse the game as if you were sitting in a bar talking over a pint, they might buy into the fact that you don’t need to give them anything else.
When you say ‘get real’ to someone, it has an amazing effect on them because, even if they were real originally, they suddenly want to seem more real now and Brolly is just telling you how real life works and how good Gaels talk about a game of football.
Poke fun at the stats guys because you’d never discuss stats over a stout.
10. Throw a spanner in the works and analyse the game
It doesn’t matter if you’ve spent the last 12 months lambasting the use of extra defenders as the death of football, you now have a licence to string up managers who are so stupid that they don’t even put one sweeper in front of their full back line.
