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John Giles and Eamon Dunphy, pictured in 2005.INPHO

The official end of a golden era – Giles and Dunphy taught us the truths England refused to acknowledge

With John Giles retiring from punditry, it’s time to acknowledge what he and the RTÉ Panel contributed to the making of modern Ireland.

7.01am, 3 Jul 2025

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Gavin Cooney

FAREWELL THEN TO John Giles, who last week called an end to a punditry career that began at the 1986 World Cup.

That his announcement comes in the same year as Eamon Dunphy stepped back from his podcast The Stand is a poignant moment for those of us who believe university cultural studies should include modules on football punditry, for Giles, Dunphy and The RTÉ Panel can be said to have played a small role in the making of modern Ireland.

For in their football punditry, The Panel were among the first to make us believe we could feel superior to the Brits.

There’s an irony that Giles stepped away from RTÉ in the summer of the Brexit referendum, as it was then the rest of Ireland caught up and realised our neighbours were afflicted with a potentially irredeemable eejitry.

But The Panel viewer saw this stuff coming years earlier. Eamon Dunphy, for instance, pre-empted much of recent English political history on the eve of the 2006 World Cup when he read an over-wrought newspaper piece, tossed it aside and explained, “The Telegraph is an irony-free zone: they believe God is English.”

It will never, ever, be better than this.pic.twitter.com/TFSIjURnXU— Kevin Coleman (@kvn_clmn) June 14, 2024

To those in Ireland who looked at Brexit and were shocked to see such an absurd frenzy of English self-absorption and self-importance, we say. . . you evidently didn’t follow England’s Golden Generation at the 2002 and 2006 World Cups.

Where the BBC and ITV were continually puzzled by the hysterical failures of Becks, Lamps, JT, Rio, and Stevie G, us RTÉ Panel viewers not only foresaw and understood their underachievement, but weren’t sure it was an underachievement at all.

This was because of the depth of Giles’ knowledge, and his pigheaded stubbornness in insisting there was a distinction between a good player and a great player. And England, as The Panel viewer was taught, did not have nearly as many great players as they thought.

It was Giles who delivered the definitive career comment on David Beckham, drawing an abrupt comparison with Marilyn Monroe. “She wasn’t the best actress, Bill, but she was the biggest star.”

And it was Giles who was able to tell us that Gerrard and Lampard were good attackers but not proper midfield players, and could certainly not play together.

It was Giles who was calling before anyone else for the regulating presence of Scholes of Manchester, and later Owen Hargreaves and Michael Carrick. England wasn’t listening.

In this analysis, Giles also identified the English streak of heroic-but-doomed individualism that sunk so many World Cups and which later led the reckless charge out of the EU. These were the lessons to which the rest of us were given early access.

Where Dunphy’s showbiz’ shtick was to say the things the BBC wouldn’t dare to say – hence the definitive comment of this era was Dunphy’s response to a softball Garth Crooks interview with Sven-Goran Eriksson that “it was the first time sex between two men had been broadcast on the BBC” – Giles said the things the Beeb wouldn’t even think to say.

The Panel was a kind of Hiberno-English of its own.

This column’s favourite explanation of how the Irish have wrestled and reshaped the oppressor’s tongue comes from Tommy Tiernan, who once said, “the English language to the Irish people is like a wall, and the word ‘f**k’ is our chisel.”

And in a manner analogous to the national neglect of its own language, The Panel treated the League of Ireland as a separate, minority sport, but they took discussion of the English game and improved it with the unique inflections and insights (and occasionally inexactitude) of the relative outsider.

We say ‘relative’ outsider, as this was only possible because Giles and Dunphy were creatures of English football. Dunphy’s style of punditry was greatly influenced by those magnificent arguments among Don Revie, Brian Clough, Jack Charlton, Malcolm Allison, and Derek Dougan, while Giles could opine and rule on greatness as a pundit because he moved to England and saw greatness up close.

Nonetheless, they returned home to teach us all with the truths England refused to acknowledge.

This is not to herald The Panel’s every utterance: their peak coincided with a ruinous complacency in Irish football, and that they lost the appetite to hold John Delaney’s FAI to account is a mark that blackens with time.

But theirs was a golden era, and Giles following Dunphy into retirement draws attention to the extent to which RTÉ appear determined to make sure it is a forgotten era.

What has become of RTÉ’s football coverage is a travesty: they have kept the rights to Ireland matches but allowed Virgin Media lead the conversation for years. This is hardly the fault of the individual pundits: tune into a game on RTÉ and you have no idea who will be presenting, who will be on the panel, and how many panellists there will be. Hell, after Ireland’s friendly with Luxembourg last month, you can’t be sure there’ll be a panel at all.

But then again, there is no emulating the glory days, as the Giles/Dunphy dynamic was irresistible.

Giles’ wisdom, knowledge and allergy to sentimentality elevated football to very important business, while Dunphy knew football was much too important to take seriously.

Things will never be as good again.

Gavin Cooney

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