Second Captains Part II

Enjoyed Tim Vickery as always, and it was good to hear him talk about the Club World Cup's importance to other parts of the world. "Just because you don't care about it" etc.

Vickery is always great value, just a fountain of knowledge on the South American game and he has a nice easygoing voice that's very agreeable to listen to on the commute.

I wasn't even arsed putting the telly on for the Luxembourg match, so can't really criticise RTE for no panel. They rightly deserve criticism for arrogantly announcing they had secured LOI rights before a deal was struck and VM nipping in ahead of them. But Fanning's criticism here about the panel felt very forced, though to be fair, everything that dullard says sounds forced.

Do you just hate listen to the pod 🤣

Not all county grounds have it. All the games on tv between division 1 games would have a hooter but not guaranteed the further down the food chain you go

Oops

I skipped through most of it tbh. I think it's purely to get a few back page headlines and to get the focus off the teams poor performances.

Shels v Linfield might be the first time I watch a LoI team since that time the barman lost the remote and couldn’t change the channel

I normally like Gavin Cooney but thought he was struggling to make a coherent argument against the NFL coming to Dublin. What relevance the game has to the housing crisis was beyond me.

Thought the same.. Was like the time they had Ken as the anti-rugby side at one of the live shows. Felt like his heart wasn't really in it, but they wanted a dissenting voice.

Absolutely diabolical. Like a first year student who was told his side of the debate 5 mins beforehand. We've reached peak summer holiday pod level already.

Agree with the Gavin Cooney comments. It was pure scatter gun stuff from him today. Flying off on tangents left, right and centre. Very hard to listen to and I am a big fan of his.

I put the blame for it though on the Second Captain boys. They, or one of them, thought that they could get a good discussion going about it. They were wrong. It was pure nonsense.

The blame is on him for appearing on the podcast to talk about it? Did he force his way on?

It was refreshing at least to hear them concede that the boycotting is performative and fleeting.

There was at least a hint of a point with the sense of endorsing US political actions - but I don't think it was very well thought through. The NFL is obviously an 'American' league but it isn't a nationalised entity. It's a completely private organisation (and ironically one of the better examples of socialist structures in action) that just does its best not to antagonise the sitting American lawmakers at any given time - in much the same way that Irish government and industry does. There's a difference between something that's 'American', and the actual United States of America itself. The NFL having a presence in Ireland is no different to Apple, Microsoft, LinkedIn, Facebook, Pfizer, Eli Lilly etc etc.

He reminded me a bit of when some fans are eager for a bit of whataboutery and conflate someone from a country owning a team, with an actual country owning a team.

Give Dismal Dion his due, calling Spurs the George Costanza of football was inspired