"Is the grilling over?" - Jim McGuinness enquired of Eoin McDevitt upon the Second Captains presenter changing the subject from Donegal football to Celtic.
He was right. It had been a grilling. A highly enjoyable one.
McGuinness was treated more like a hostile witness than a guest on the show, though there was no deficit of respect for the All-Ireland winning manager.
Perhaps more interviewers should take note of McDevitt's persistence and unwillingness to be fobbed off with a non-answer. It certainly made for entertaining television.
McDevitt asked McGuinness if he felt there was a double standard in Kevin Cassidy being ostracised from the Donegal panel for contributing to Declan Bogue's book about the county's footballers and him now revealing details about the group in his own autobiography.
Unsurprisingly, the 42-year-old thought himself not guilty of hypocrisy.
In the same context as Alex Ferguson writing a book after he stepped away, it's after the event. The situation with Kevin was, everything we were doing, we were trying to win the All-Ireland, we were putting our lives on hold. And everything we were doing was laid bare for every single manager in Ulster and the country. Every single method that I was bringing to what we were trying to achieve was laid bare in that moment.
I'm gone now and there's another man managing Donegal. That's why Alex Ferguson has written his book now, because he's gone from the Man Utd job. It's the exact same context with me. That's what people do. They explain what happened in a job after the event, not during the event.
Current Donegal manager Rory Gallagher released a statement recently expressing disappointment with McGuinness' book. While working as McGuinness' number two, he believed there to be an understanding that what happened within the group, would stay within the group.
Obviously, this has not been the case.
In one section, a conversation between the manager and coach - in which Gallagher articulates a belief that some senior players within the group might need to be moved on - is revealed. Gallagher is still working with many of those individuals.
McGuinness justified the inclusion of this detail by saying that if he had not, people would accuse him of 'fudging' events.
That's what happened. It's in the book.
If I didn't put in the book what happened, people would be saying that I fudged things. There's 320 pages in the book but we're talking about Rory Gallagher and Kevin Cassidy now. I've done a lot of interviews in the last few weeks and that's been the tone. Whereas the book is about much more than that.
This is what sells and people love conflict. Tomorrow morning, you'll wake up and see something in the paper about it. They'll be looking for Rory to comment on it. Rory's in the job now and I wish him well and I wish the boys well. They need to get after that Ulster Championship and move forward.
What was said, happened, and if I didn't say it, I wouldn't be true to the book.
