Indo Sport
Friday panel | Evolving sports journalism, physical football, Arsenal psychoanalysis
30 Jan 2026
Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: What are the entry points into sports journalism?
This is an Irish Independent Podcast.
Anytime Joe was off, myself and Ronan, Alana, the team, we spitball ideas. Who's going to step up? What kind of show are we going to do? And I always say one thing to them that Billy Bean might have said in the film Moneyball. You're still trying to replace Joe. I told you we can't do it. But what we can do is recreate him in the aggregate.
And the aggregate is always a stacked Friday panel of heavy hitters. It always starts with John Green.
john how are you hello there it always has a virgin media television star dave mcintyre how are you very good thanks and it always has a fanning in this case evan fanning evan how are you getting on very good thanks the last time i met a john green actually outside of the workplace was outside crew park on saturday night where i was watching derry lose to me and uh
Lovely young fella came up to me with a shoe that I had dropped, one of my child's shoes, and he handed it over to me and I chatted away to him. And I came home and John Green actually texted me and said I was talking to his son the whole time.
Yeah, and the postscript to that was, he said, he told you he was John from Slane and he absolutely could not understand how you didn't put the rest of it together from there.
Yeah.
It's great to have you all on. So some stuff that's going on before we go anywhere. Champions League draw has just been made. 17th of February is the first leg. Monaco PSG stands out. Benfica and Real Madrid. Carabao got Newcastle. You'll find the draw online. You've probably already seen it by now. This weekend, Liverpool are playing Newcastle. Is it even worth mentioning Spurs at this stage?
Spurs are playing Man City. That sounds like a good tie. Fourth best team in Europe. Yeah, fair enough. We've got two All-Ireland finals of the last two years on repeat this weekend. Armagh v Galway and Donegal v Kerry. Not to mention Derry v. Tyrone and everyone's going to be keeping an eye on that. League of Ireland starts next week. Bows v. Rovers at the Aviva. Derry v. Sligo.
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Chapter 2: How is sports journalism evolving with digital media?
We are now in that World Cup year. The days and months and weeks are going to tick by very quickly. There's an awful lot of paperwork that needs to be done. Like you've got all these countries who have supporters, players, coaches, backroom teams, all need visas. And a lot of them are coming from countries that right now don't appear to be welcome. That's pretty much every country. Pretty much.
So will we end up at some sort of a flashpoint later in the year where... like a key player for one of these nations won't be allowed playing the World Cup because his visa has been denied. He may have to give back his Peace Award. Yeah, the Peace Award he was. He never actually won.
Closer to home, we have two rowing podcasts, so Rowing Ireland and Sport Ireland. We're up in the Aractus this week. And John, you were on with Joe yesterday on the Indo Sport Feed. Really good podcast on everything that's been happening there on foot of the Sunday Independent Investigation. And we have Paul Kimmage on the Indo Daily. as well.
So there's podcasts dovetail nicely together if you want to catch up on that. And tonight there's a live show at the Helix. So Six Nations is starting next week. Dave, I believe you're in Paris. Yes. France v Ireland. And this is a weird one because this time last year everyone was talking about Grand Slams. And now I'm hearing a 13-point difference in the bookies.
I can't remember the last time we went into a Six Nations Championship where expectations were as low as they are now, which maybe isn't the worst thing. I think we have become almost expectant, accustomed to the Ireland team winning games and contending for Grand Slams and Triple Crowns and Championships. And we are obviously going into the lion's den next week.
They produced against the odds in Marseille two years ago. I was lucky enough to commentate on that game. Probably the only standout performance that Ireland have produced since the World Cup in France in 2023. And expectations weren't that high that night, even though France were without Dupont that time. He is around this time around. But...
I don't think it's the worst thing in the world to be going into a Six Nations Championship, the penultimate one before the World Cup, missing so many bodies. Andy Farrells often talk about how he and his players love to embrace adversity. Well, they are staring adversity in the face going into the Stade de France next week, missing players in a lot of positions, but particularly the front row.
And this is the time to... Find out how stacked we are and where our major shortfalls are. Not in October 2027, when some of these people who may well be expected and required to play a big role of the World Cup haven't been road tested at all.
What's your sort of prep, if you don't mind me asking? When do you go out to Paris? Do you put aside two full days to do your research, write your notes? I remember Clive Tildesley, was it? He must have put out his notes.
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Chapter 3: What preparation is involved in match commentary?
Spend a bit of time chipping away at it, doing a lot of reading, watching old, the last few meetings of the two teams and
watch some URC Champions Cup highlights see who's sort of tries that have been scored and obviously listen to all the indoor sport output over the next week good man Dave so yeah really looking forward to it well it's interesting to have the collection of aggregators I suppose that I called these earlier on all of us today but like people from three different mediums primarily so Evan you're
running Fabric Social. You're very much an influential face there, an influential mind. That's a company that's doing a lot of campaigns with brands and bringing, I suppose, brand messages to life.
Yeah, so we're a social creative agency, essentially. So we run social channels and strategy and content for lots of different brands in Ireland. And we do a lot of sports content within that. We work with Sky. We do a lot of stuff with the Ireland football team. We work with Lifestyle Sports.
We recently just launched the New Ireland kit with Troy Parrott and Abby Larkin and kind of devised and created all the social content strategy. And all that's obviously being a social first campaign. That's not a TV campaign necessarily or anything like that. It's working with Lifestyle to deliver it all socially first.
So, yeah, but obviously, like I worked, we go back into the media landscape, into sort of digital media. And, you know, my background is obviously prior to that, working across legacy media, shall we say. Yeah. Guardian, Telegraph, stuff like that.
No, but you were instrumental, I suppose, when I worked in Joe and we started podcasting. I think it was 2016 was our first podcast and you were very much driving that. I think it was the GA one that we started with and then we started getting brands coming on board and for the podcast, it completely changed the way we were thinking. Yeah.
And it's good to have yourself and to have Dave, I suppose, from the TV side of things and John from the Sunday paper side of things, because Rory O'Connor was on the Left Wing podcast and he said something interesting. He was at the Six Nations lunch in Edinburgh and he described how traditional rugby writers are down the pecking order in terms of the priority when it comes to sports.
talking to players and talking to coaches so one of the things he said to will was a very interesting microcosm of where the media is that we used to be the main event when i started but now it's influencers and content creators and people with phone and cameras and we're off in the corner waiting for our five minutes you just know where you stand in the world i thought that was an interesting um suppose line from rural region yeah well look at us that the world of the legacy media is has completely changed um
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Chapter 4: How has physicality and set pieces returned to sports?
It's all those little casual contacts that you have with people that develop relationships. That's how you cover your section. And that's the real value in that now.
You're being told little bits and pieces off the record. And you do very often hear, you know, someone had to speak anonymously with a view to protecting relationships. That's why it is very important for someone like Rudd to still be on the beat. I was on that beat with Rudd for years.
And you could count on one hand that you managed to get something from a player or a coach that was of much interest. Really, the only...
quotes that are of any value nowadays are post-match and even we just need to go back to the the bells of Croke Park on Saturday for the a fairly innocuous question that was asked of Jimmy Guinness after the Donegal Dublin game on Saturday afternoon and how much analysis and discussion was generated by his refusal to answer what seemed a fairly fair question um
Obviously, you want to be speaking to these people as close to the full time whistle as possible, because that's when their emotions are still running high. And they might be their guard might be not quite as strong and structured as it would be an hour later when they've had a chance to parse their thoughts. But in terms of pre-match stuff.
Any sort of a pre-match interview nowadays, there's just an element of the box ticking to it. You're rarely, unless it's Jose Mourinho or somebody old school, he's trying to get some sort of a message out there. It's so rare now that you hear something that raises an eyebrow in the build-up to a game.
And Rod said that before, I think it was the week before that we were on Bits and Bobs together and he was sort of saying, I wish I was going to the Connacht match. He knew it was going to be a tough gig, but in fairness to him, actually... He picks on interest and out of being there, like he said, you have to go, you have to go to these things.
That's it, you're still getting a feel for the place. You're testing the vibe, you're speaking to other people. You might be speaking to PR people who are working with the various unions, speaking to, you might just have a little chat with a physio or something and you never know what sort of little tidbit of information you would pick up.
Yeah. We got an email in from Alan and he said he's living in London. He was back in Cork for the weekend to see his parents and attend a hurling. Speaking to my sports and newspaper mad dad about your podcast and how I think he would love it. He reads The Examiner. Look, I'm okay to say that, John.
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Chapter 5: What happened to Raheem Sterling's career?
Take him off our hands. Spent 18 amazing months down there. And then Newstalk rang and said, look, would you like to come back and work full time and off the ball? So I got to go back to Dublin.
Another crowd said, take him.
Another crowd delighted to see the back of me. And then you'd start doing little bits and pieces of commentary and then kind of TV commentary.
broadcasters start getting in touch saying would you do just a game here or a game there and then that builds and kind of just snowballs that was 18 years ago so I'm thankful that I've been able to kind of flag my way through to where I am today and it's been an unbelievable journey it's still the best job in the world and I would recommend it to anybody but obviously there are
there's intense competition out there and as soon as you, and I would semi-regularly be contacted by people on LinkedIn in particular, journalism students or young men and women who are considering getting into the media landscape when it's obviously a far more different environment
landscape today than it was when I was getting into it but as soon as you start telling people that they're probably going to have to work for free for a while tends to turn them off a little bit that you I mean I would have spent two or three years working on Polish football Belgian football like games that literally nobody's watching getting reps
that was all it was it allows you you're obviously fulfilling a role for somebody but from a selfish point of view you're just getting before you know it you have 100 150 200 games done there's an awful lot of mistakes to make that you can then hopefully eradicate moving forward and eventually the quality and the stakes involved will increase and then that culminates with like something like what's going to happen next Thursday night for example or a World Cup final or something but there I tried to shorten the story as much as possible for you there Lester your listeners turn off
But no, but it's like, it's, it's the difference now or in this, this, like this kind of era where, you know, we've, we've intruded working together over the years and you, someone comes for a job or someone's going, you can see their social profiles. You can see what they're saying. Have they got something to say?
Maybe they've built a channel, maybe they found a little niche and they've developed their own thing. You're talking about working for free. That's the working for free. Now you're doing it at home and your evenings in your bedroom. And suddenly you have such a grasp of someone. I always do that when I'm recruiting.
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Chapter 6: Does Arsenal have the bottle to win the Premier League?
It's definitely Twitter. I mean, I remember like the first people trying to show me Twitter who were kind of, you know, not unlike, you know, TikTok now. It was like a couple of the younger guys in the office are all over Twitter and they're showing it to me. And I was like, I don't know what this is or what doesn't make any sense. Here's your guys in your little chat room.
And then suddenly it obviously exploded. So, yeah, I mean, I think there's always... There's always those things, but you realize the power of them and you see the direction of travel and how people are using them.
And quite quickly, if you're open to it, I don't have to be an expert on any of them just to trust that that's the direction things are going and put your faith in people who are the experts. Again, look, but at the same time, I think everything can coexist. Like, I think there's a wonderful space for long form journalism.
You know, we started talking about this, about the Six Nations, all sorts of PR event and these bite-sized content pieces. So, you know, maybe it's best to use the social. There's lots of room for everything to coexist.
And if you find that hard over the years, John, the change in media landscape in terms of you're still producing long-form journalism, but asking the journalists to also then, like we're talking about Rory O'Connor, who's mastered a podcast now, doing loads of video, doing loads of long-form analysis.
Yeah, like it's, they're going, like it's a hard gig, you know, you go to an Olympics or a World Cup football, Rugby World Cup, It's all day, every day. You're contributing to podcasts. You're making videos. And then you're producing copy as well.
Rudd is still expected to do the job he was hired to do. And everything else on top of that.
But in terms of the overall... I mean, I'm obviously the elder statesman in the room today. And so... You know, I go back to when I started to deal with line set machines for people where a journalist would write an article in or type an article on a typewriter and then hand it to somebody who would then retype it.
i mean so like i saw that happening i happened to work in my very first job was in one of the first newspapers in the country to go all computer so that the journalists had if you remember the old what would it call the little max do you remember those little uh the very first mac apple mac they were a fantastic little machine a quirky little machine so that was the longford leader and
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Chapter 7: What psychological factors affect Arsenal's performance?
He was saying that it's all hard work and perseverance. I think his point was... I don't think he... I think people were crediting him for a point they didn't really make, but I think he tried to make that point so people just rammed with it anyway. I think his point was...
The Champions League is more attacking and more creative and the Premier League is more basic, more hard work and perseverance. So what I did say was in the Champions League, teams are much more open. They all try to play. It's less transitional in the Premier League. It's more physical than I've ever known it to be. It's like a basketball game sometimes. It's so relentless physically.
There's not much control. It's just a run-in game. Sometimes it's about duels. Who wins the duels wins the game or moments. The Champions League is a bit more of an older style of game. It's a bit more football-based. Teams come and try to play proper football.
I mean, that's not shade. There's this narrative and it's always in the transfer window that it really comes to the fore. I mean, I don't know really whether he knew
what he was trying to say there but I know what I can see which is that you know this time of the year when players are looking to be when the clubs are looking to offload players in the Premier League and the narrative around them and like there's a few say at Man United like Xerxes and people like this at the moment and the narrative is that you know
Clubs in Italy or in Germany or in Spain are interested in this guy who hasn't been able to perform in the Premier League. And it is always this kind of implication that there is this cohort of players in the Premier League that would be able to thrive in Italy and Spain and Germany. And kind of the bit in silence at the end in brackets is where the football is shit.
And this always seems to take hold in the summer and in the transfer window. And I don't understand this kind of, how this Xerxes guy, how Scott McTominay was. He's the greatest player in the world. Yeah. Or who was the other guy who left tonight? Anthony. Anthony. The longest. How they can go and thrive in these other leagues.
because that football is different, you know, and the implication being that it's, you know, it's not good. I don't understand it, you know.
But, yeah. Well, it's a farmer's league is what they say.
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Chapter 8: How do team dynamics influence leadership in football?
the Liverpool, Tottenham, Newcastle to actually play. Whereas when they go to play, because they're not going to just go out and put 10, 11 men behind the ball when they're playing Liverpool on a Tuesday evening and then have to then reprogram themselves to go and play a local team in a derby game in the Norwegian League or something on the Saturday. And so it's almost an affront.
Like the way you hear Ernest Lott speak in recent weeks about this low block. It's like he's actually giving out to the opposition for setting up the way they are. You're making our lives really difficult. We're really struggling to find a way to play through you. Why would a lower ranking Premier League team go and play Liverpool or City or Tottenham or Arsenal and allow them to play?
So I think the answer to what Gordon is saying is kind of pretty obvious. But... I did the Bodo Glimt Manchester City game last week. Bodo Glimt were absolutely amazing. And they played the exact same way they would play if they were playing Molde the following weekend. They don't change the way they're playing. So City had the opportunity to play, but they just weren't interested emotionally.
But I mean, that's the same argument we've had for years with Celtic and Rangers or even Leinster and rugby that they're so used to winning all the time and winning easily and being a dominant team in every game or 90%.
So when it comes to the crunch in Celtic or Rangers in European competition, maybe Leinster and rugby when they get to the latter stages of Europe, they're not able, they don't know how to
you know withstand half a half of pressure or whatever it is like that's that's almost that argument that you're saying that these teams just come in and play the same way but I think yeah like Gordon you mentioned like Liverpool like Arnie Slott came out and I think congratulated Eintracht Frankfurt earlier this season for like thanks for not not like making too hard for us there and playing the way you always did after a 5-1 win because every week you know they were losing in the Premier League by someone who you know played pragmatically
I'm going to make a bold prediction on this and I'm going to say, and then you can hit me with it in May, that there won't be an English team in the Champions League final this year.
there's a lot of outs there for English teams there's a lot of them going to be in contention over the next few weeks it's there you can clip it it's going to make a less less risky production but like the level I think the levels are so like I've checked trying to do something the other day and I would say I think Bournemouth would win Serie A like that's the different level of teams there that's a bold statement that's a clip come back to me in May and we'll see you in May
but like honestly you're saying that and I'm wondering I'm not wondering is football in a crisis but is it in a crisis like this is a World Cup year as well you know it's going to go to America and it's going to is it going to revert to this you know physical long throw set pieces like back to what we tried to get away from like what rugby seems to be falling into you know I saw Felix Jones on a podcast saying rugby's great and I thought well you're you're in South Africa you're going to say that like you know everything's going your way and Stephen Kenny you won't believe this Sean O'Connor did a piece with Stephen Kenny he was over with
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