The best critics are often in exile, so when the German media went searching for the appropriate condemnation of their dismal World Cup exit to Paraguay on Monday, they found it on RTÉ.
“Hamann attacks Nagelsmann,” screamed the headline on Bild, Germany’s bestselling newspaper, above a reproduction of Dietmar Hamann’s comments immediately after Germany’s first penalty shoot-out defeat at a World Cup.
“Talk is cheap, and I’ve never been convinced that this is a team united,” began Hamann, before criticising manager Julian Nagelsmann’s non-scouting of alternate squad options, upcoming opponents and the playing conditions for Germany this summer.
That RTÉ quickly clipped Hamann’s comments and posted them on social media helped them spread to his homeland.
READ MORE
“When I started here in 2010, things may not have spread as quickly, but now so much is online,” Hamann says.
Yes, Hamann has been opining on RTÉ for 16 years. Only Richie Sadlier can vie with him for the title of “senior analyst” vacated by John Giles.
“The people at RTÉ are great,” he says, “that’s why I am still coming back.” Hamann also enjoys coming to Dublin, even if these late kick-offs are hostile to visits to a couple of his favourite pubs. A demanding tournament schedule means preparation in the morning, a walk around Stephen’s Green after lunch, and then a move to Montrose before the evening’s broadcast.
Hamann’s playing days were coming to an end when he was recruited to the RTÉ panel along with Ossie Ardiles for the 2010 World Cup. Ardiles brought an impossible glamour: one RTÉ staffer recalls the Argentinian excusing himself from a meeting to take a call, returning to explain “it was Diego”. Diego was Maradona, who wasn’t exactly at a loose end given he was managing Argentina.
Our familiarity with Hamann can occlude his achievements as a player. He played in the 2002 World Cup final, won a pair of Bundesliga titles with Bayern Munich and became arguably the most influential half-time substitute in the history of the Champions League final when he helped Liverpool so audaciously turn the tide against AC Milan in 2005.
Hamann says his achievements as a player helped his immediate acceptance by the existing RTÉ panel. (Sadlier, by contrast, had a more turbulent relationship with Eamon Dunphy in particular.)
“Eamon told me early on, if you want to have a career in broadcasting, you have to be able to see what’s going on, then you have to be able to articulate it, and then you have to have the bottle to say it,” says Hamann, adding with a sense of understatement that: “Eamon was the best for doing this.”
Hamann struck up a friendship with Dunphy and learned from him the virtue of being impervious.
“Once for lunch I went with him to Dawson Street, and there wasn’t one person who didn’t say something to him. Nine people would say, ‘well done Eamon’, and one guy passed and abused him. Nothing bothered him. You talk about players you were proud to share a pitch with, I learned an awful lot from Eamon. It was an honour to cover games with him.”
They shared terrain away from just the studio. During their early years working together on RTÉ, Hamann often joined Dunphy in a members’ bar around the corner from the Shelbourne Hotel, and he remembers one night in which Dunphy commandeered the piano and began to sing – to the loud disapproval of another member.
“He wasn’t best pleased,” says Hamann. “I had to calm him down and get him off the piano.”
Hamann subsequently dabbled in coaching and took over as manager of Stockport County in 2011. He resigned after winning only three of 19 games, citing the broken promise of a failed takeover bid. He never returned to coaching, saying he didn’t have the capacity to excel to the standards he expected.
“I was in touch with Rafa [Benitez] after I finished playing, and he was on a different level,” says Hamann. “He may have been a bad example as he was so good. [Coaching] was a different thought process and it was a talent I just didn’t possess. I would have struggled to get across to the players.”
Hamann’s means of staying in football was to commit to punditry. He took some RTÉ lessons to Match of the Day, where he caused a stir by declaring Manchester City would not win the Champions League if they kept Yaya Touré in central midfield as he did not do enough defensive work. (The glamorous, goalscoring and positionally undisciplined midfielder was the sacred cow most routinely slaughtered by Giles and Dunphy – just ask Frank Lampard or Steven Gerrard.)
City went out of the Champions League in the very next round. “Thankfully I was right,” says Hamann.
Hamann also learned from RTÉ the importance of maintaining distance from the subjects of his punditry. TV coverage is mostly making a virtue of propinquity now, with pitchside presentation and jocular player interviews the industry standard. By contrast, Dunphy et al felt liberated by their remove and sold their views as the honest truth that the British broadcasters were too compromised to speak.
The quintessential expression of this was Dunphy’s description of a softball interview between England manager Sven-Göran Eriksson and Garth Crooks during the 2006 World Cup as “the first time I’ve seen two men have sex on the BBC”.
While it’s easy for Hamann to retain distance on RTÉ, it is a little tricker when working on the Bundesliga in Germany. He is helped by the fact he spent most of his playing career in England, and has no interest in rekindling relationships with those he played with in Germany.
“You can’t be friends and do the job at the same time,” he says. “It is a conflict of interest.”
He has consistently rankled Jürgen Klopp, who once barbed his voice with vicious sarcasm and called Hamann a “fantastic source” in response to a journalist quoting Hamann’s criticism. Klopp’s next words were more straight-talking. “Didi Hamann doesn’t deserve for his phrase to be used. Ask your own question.”
“I haven’t a problem with Klopp,” says Hamann. “If he has a problem with me, so be it. If I see him, I will shake his hand.”
The panel Hamann joined is now held up by some as an unflattering comparison to RTÉ’s present collection of analysts and presenters, who are constantly rotated and routinely stand accused of not setting the agenda as often as their predecessors. Dunphy himself has been a stringent critic of the coverage since he left.
“In this case it was just a unique situation,” says Hamann of the shadow cast by Bill, John, Liam and Eamon. “When I found out how big these guys were here, I don’t think you have that in any other country at any time. I think it is very rare to have a team of four people who pulled the whole nation in front of the telly when the half-time whistle or full-time whistle blew.
“They are four unique characters with their own stories, and were brilliant on the box. The Irish public just has to appreciate they were able to watch these guys for so long. What these four guys did, I don’t think will ever be repeated.”
Hamann separately wonders whether RTÉ’s old guard could be as big if they came along today.
“Would it have been possible for those guys to have been as big now as 20-30 years ago, or would social media have knocked them down?” he asks. Any pundit doing their job will split opinion, but social media amplifies only those who disagree. Today it takes a stiffer spine than ever to, in Dunphy’s words, have the bottle to call it.
“I read very little but the abuse I get is substantial,” says Hamann of his own attitude to social media. “It has never bothered me. It is probably from someone hiding behind a name that isn’t his. It won’t stop me saying how it is. I have a responsibility to RTÉ and the viewer.”
Hamann has carved out one exception to his principle of scrupulous detachment.
“I have become a bit of an Ireland fan,” he says. “I am allowed to, as I’m not Irish.”
