RTÉ dream team still more than a match for rival soccer pundits

TV VIEW: THEY'RE NOT the sort of job adverts you ever get to see in the newspapers, or on monster.ie. The art of soccer punditry tends to be a closed shop.

For starters, you've got to have been an ex-player. Not just any player, but a professional player. The poor sods who plied their trade in The Acres in the Phoenix Park wouldn't possibly know what goes on in a real dressingroom.

Secondly, you've got to be able to lounge back in a seat. Preferably with a smirk, or some similar facial expression which conveys the fact your fellow ex-professionals get the point even if the armchair fan doesn't really. You don't even need a wide range of vocabulary. Just listen to Jamie Redknapp's words of wisdom. "Chelsea have scored in every game this season, and they're going to need to keep that record up to win today."

'Nuff said?

The same, it must be said, can't be generally levelled at the RTÉ, who, of course, have the prince of them all - Eamo - and the daddy of them all - Gilesy - but, in more recent times, have unearthed Kenny Cunningham, who tends to get the message across without the need for any kind of smirk à la Alan Hansen or, the king of the smirks, Alan Shearer.

In opening up Match of the Dayon Saturday night, a smirking Gary Lineker introduced Hansen and Shearer as representing "punditry at its most insightful". In truth, it wasn't. The RTÉ lads would generally tear the opposition to shreds in much the same way as five-star chef Des Cahill's hero Paul O'Connell does in the rucking and mauling of a Munster match.

We'll allow Darragh Maloney his touch of hyperbole that Roy Keane's resignation was the "story of the year" in RTÉ's Premier Soccer Saturday- ahem, two golf majors for an Irishman, three Olympic boxing medals etc - and even forgive them for opening the programme with 10 minutes of punditry about Keano before getting to the gory details of what actually happened in the Premier League that day.

Personally, I'd have enjoyed the heavy dialogue after the Manchester United-Sunderland match rather than it dominating the start of the highlights show.

Still, the Donnybrook pundits came out miles ahead of the BBC's Match of the Dayduo of Hansen and Shearer, who kept the Keane slant to little more than a minute (after the United match, admittedly) and were far more gentle on the ex-Sunderland boss than the guys in Montrose. The main drift of Hansen's punditry was that Keane had been "good" for Sunderland.

In the opposite corner, Giles and Cunningham - who'd played under Keane in his first year at the Stadium of Light - were not so soft on Keane. Giles pointed out that "80 per cent of the job in management" was in buying in the right players for the club and that Keane had hardly covered himself in glory in this area.

Cunningham gave a reasoned and intelligent appraisal. "It is always difficult on the outside looking in. Usually, you need to be on the inside to experience these things . . . (but) I sense there is a couple of different things. The majority shareholder came into the club during the summer and maybe began asking a few more difficult questions around the football club and particularly in relation to the manager's transfer policy and the manager would have been aware of that . . . (also) there was that natural pull (for Keane) between family and professional responsibilities in relation to the football club . . . it is a very difficult one to balance but if you are going to make that commitment to a club, as a family man it is not that easy."

Cunningham added: "He'd lost the dressingroom . . . when he first came into the club, I was there as a player. He was exactly what the club needed. It was rudderless, it was drifting, it needed firm leadership and that's what he gave. But he was never very close to the dressingroom. His management style was he liked to put some real distance between himself and the players. A lot of distance, in fact, which meant the players never really had that close relationship with the manager, which didn't really matter that first season because we'd a great squad of players, but the step up to the Premiership is a totally different matter."

Giles, who'd been at Leeds during Brian Clough's short and disastrous spell, said even great managers need to have the ingredients with which to work in backing up his assessment that 80 per cent of the manager's job is getting in the right players. In Clough's case at Derby and Nottingham Forest, he had Peter Taylor to do that for him. "Cloughie couldn't work his magic on them unless they were good players," he opined.

When the going's tough, a manager's life is not a happy one. One of Keane's only sparring partners at Old Trafford was also in the managerial mire and fighting for his own survival.

But Kenny Cunningham couldn't understand where Blackburn Rover's Paul Ince was coming from with his conspiracy theory that pundits were out to get former Red Devils who had turned to management, and pointed out that in attempting to defend himself, Ince had tried to "shove Joe Kinnear and Harry Redknapp under a bus by saying he was amazed they weren't getting more stick. I hope he is more impressive within the confines of the dressingroom and around the football club than he is in front of the TV," added Cunningham, an ex-player who you'd think could actually make a decent fist at management.