Sign in. It’s quick, free and it’s up to you.
An account is an optional way to support the work we do. Find out more.
WHETHER HE WAS the young skinny lad in the V-neck jumper or the suave, dapper older man with the honeyed voice, to many, or even most, the late Michael Lyster was the GAA made flesh.
You could have told anyone he was the presenter of The Sunday Game, but he was also the GAA president, the director-general, your local county board chairman and secretary of the club.
It would have figured, but it would also have got him completely wrong; he may have worn a suit, but he was no ‘suit.’
On RTÉ’s Sunday night show, Joanne Cantwell teased some anecdotes out of her panellists Liam Sheedy, Patrick Horgan, Peter Canavan and Éamonn Fitzmaurice.
All of them mentioned the value that Lyster brought to the All-Star tours. In pre-Covid times, the All-Star teams would head off to an exotic location and reward the players and the journalists that started the scheme and picked the teams.
It was the only meaningful time that players and team management could relax in the company of the media. With Lyster around, he prised players open like oyster shells with a flick knife of easy charm and instant familiarity.
“I was fortunate enough to be on some of the All-Stars trips,” explained Liam Sheedy.
“And himself, Vincent Hogan and Martin Breheny would be holding court. The common denominator was laughter.”
Those mentioned, along with Sean Moran of the Irish Times, represented something of a Four Headed Horsemen of the Craic Apocalypse.
Lyster, Breheny, Hogan and Moran are not men ahead of their time, but rather men that defined their own era. I suspect none of them would have been crazy about the TikTok generation, how disposable it all is on one hand and yet how serious people take themselves now.
Rather, they live and expressed themselves in the oral tradition. Lyster and Breheny came from an older Ireland that can be summed up in their beginnings in the Tuam Herald.
Even talking to Breheny on Monday, their yarns have a rustic quality.
It’s well circulated now that when he was a cub reporter, Lyster started a music column focusing on the showbands and country scene. An idea was hatched to get the newspapers’ readers to vote for an awards scheme; best live act, best album, all that stuff.
All the winners were then asked to come and play in Tuam on a Monday night, to which they were delighted to come along on a quiet night and pick up an award.
On one of these occasions, Breheny was the bouncer. He took his duties seriously. Anyone without a pass was being refused admission.
It got hairy between him and one man that insisted he was there to pick up an award and eventually Breheny was asked by Lyster to relent and let Joe Dolan come through the doors.
The two also featured on the field of play together for the Herald in a Connacht championship among the various newspapers. They won a provincial title with Breheny at midfield and Lyster at corner-back, their cause perhaps helped by the influx of senior footballers from Lyster’s Killererin club.
Upon leaving Tuam, Lyster was able to grow into his roles in RTÉ.
After all, there were only six live matches broadcast each season.
His work deepened over decades. He learned the chemistry of panel discussions and how to impose authority when required.
While RTÉ juggled and rotated studio analysts towards the end of his final year of 2018, for the big gigs he would be joined by Pat Spillane, Joe Brolly and Colm O’Rourke for football, while it was Tomas Mulcahy, Ger Loughnane and Cyril Farrell for hurling.
It would be a bit syrupy to say that it was always a quality broadcast; there was always too much ego from the ‘talent’ for that. At times, it could veer into tedium as voices battled for the oxygen of time to indulge themselves.
You just didn’t need to hear about Bernard Flynn busting Mick Lyons’ nose again anyway.
Lyster has been praised by some of his former pundits for his journalistic rigour, but they have that bit wrong. What he had instead was an innate understanding of the chemistry of television.
On Monday morning, RTÉ Radio 1 played a clip from 2012 when he turned on Joe Brolly, who had recently labelled Kerry forward Colm ‘Gooch’ Cooper as a ‘choker’.
It must have taken Brolly by surprise because while he began explaining, he had to contend with Pat Spillane’s gleeful interruptions. Sensing the moment, Lyster asked Brolly if he was digging a bigger hole for himself.
It’s not an easy job, but Lyster had Brolly in a logic straitjacket by this stage. He brought the discussion home and shut it down at the same time by asking if Brolly was in fact misrepresented by the comments, leaving the Derryman floundering.
A journalist would have put the charge to Brolly and then listened patiently to a response before picking up any potential caveats while keeping Spillane at bay.
That would have been journalism, but it also would have been really boring.
The odd thing is that up north in my childhood, Lyster didn’t cut through on that level.
Our own RTÉ reception in Fermanagh was like watching a snowstorm, so we stuck to BBC NI from when they started broadcasting the Ulster championship in 1990, and UTV later.
My father wasn’t too fussed about Gaelic games back then. His own passions lay in where he could source adrenaline through kayaking, skiing and tarmac rallying. We spent many a Saturday standing in a ditch with soaking trainers watching Mark 2 Escorts take tight corners with exaggerated diffing to hoots of delight from men in Subaru jackets. Stop judging me.
It was through the world of rallying that I became aware of Michael Lyster, the rally man.
Later, once the Sky TV came in and we had acceptable RTÉ reception, Lyster’s working life came as a huge surprise to me.
Many years later, I found myself opposite Lyster at a table in Croke Park, helping to pick the All-Stars.
He didn’t seem to relish the tedium of the process and during a break in proceedings, I asked him a question about rallying that continued for an hour as we discussed Bertie Fisher, Andrew Nesbitt, Frank Meagher, the tail-happy habits of the Opel Manta and Mark 2 Escorts, the smell of petrol burning, backfiring, rubber scorched onto roads and his own Sierra Cosworth.
It’s been suggested to me that those who want to race cars and bikes at top speed towards corners with stone walls do it because their heart rates barely exceed 45 bpm otherwise.
That figures, as while a panel discussion was taking off and a producer was no doubt in Lyster’s earpiece, he was as relaxed and comfortable as sitting in front of his own hearth.
Plenty think that this stuff is easy, and then even a Pat Spillane will come along and back themselves to do the gig and we see that, in fact, it’s a science and a performance art.
Michael Lyster has been a loss to broadcasting for some time now, but a far greater loss to his family. He was something else.
Written by Declan Bogue and originally published on The 42 whose award-winning team produces original content that you won’t find anywhere else: on GAA, League of Ireland, women’s sport and boxing, as well as our game-changing rugby coverage, all with an Irish eye. Subscribe here.
To embed this post, copy the code below on your site
have your say