1992 was Pat Spillane's first real year in the analysis booth for RTE. He'd only finally quit the inter-county scene the year before after Kerry were well-beaten by Down in the All-Ireland semi-final. All year, he'd worn a knee bandage almost as oppressive as the one Colm O'Rourke had been forced to don. (Incidentally, after the Munster Final in '91, Jim Carney proclaimed 'all's well in the Kingdom again!' He was very, very wrong.)
Among the exhaustive collection of videos amassed by youtube's finest, killianm2, there is footage of the 1992 All-Ireland semi-final between Dublin and Clare, a game attended by one Kevin Costner. RTE weren't long picking out Costner in his cowboy hat. He was in town hoping to make a film about Michael Collins, an idea that didn't come to fruition and was taken on later by Neil Jordan.
The Dubs were red roaring favourites for the match against Clare and the All-Ireland itself, given that Donegal's semi-final with Mayo stank the place out and was widely derided at the time as one of the worst games every played in Croke Park, a historically poor match. Tommy Carr remembered how three Dublin players had left the Donegal semi-final early, when the match was still in the balance, saying that 'we'd beat the pick of both teams'.
Sitting in the old RTE box at the Nally Stand, Spillane gave his assessment of the game as well as the state of the football in 1992 more generally. Watching in 2016, the analysis given here has a timeless quality. It hasn't dated at all. He could give more or less the same speech on Sunday week.
It's a poor standard, it's a very poor championship this year... What I notice is one skill that's very much missing in football at the moment is the long kick pass where the ball quickly from one end of the field to the other, from one side of the field to the other and getting scores. There's no flowing play in football anymore. It's too scrappy, defences dominating. Very, very fit teams, very committed teams. But I think there's an absence of quality forwards.
Nowadays, many lament the turn that Gaelic football has taken in the 21st century, waxing lyrical about the laid-back, cavalier brio of the 1980s and the 1990s.
But it transpires that the state of football in 1992 was remarkably similar to the state of football in 2016. And if you go back further to Kerry's golden era, you'd no doubt hear the old stagers giving out about 'Gaelic Basketball' and the like.
The truth is Gaelic football was always a game whose best days were behind it.
Here's the full video:
