Saturday, November 22, 2025
Hi there, welcome to Broken Play, aka my Saturday morning Substack scribbling, and since you’re here, if you haven’t already, please hit the subscribe button if you don’t mind.
Many thanks once more to Hugo Gordon for recording his part in our Preview Show looking ahead to the big match with South Africa, unfortunately our schedules didn’t allow us to record at the same time but we still managed to cover the match pretty well I thought, click here to judge for yourself.
It has been a cold week round these parts, hasn’t been that long since I could easily go outside in a t-shirt yet now we’re digging out the scarves and gloves. It’s the kind of weather that makes even a seasoned rugby fan like myself even just a tiny bit happy not to be heading to the Aviva later on, although I suppose if a free ticket were to fall in my lap by this evening I might change my tune. That’s not a hint to anyone reading this by the way. No, no, I REALLY mean it, it’s not.
So last Sunday due to a late (and totally understandable) withdrawal of my wrap pod guest at the 11th hour I was forced to do it “solo” and I actually surprised myself how relatively unafraid I was to do it. That may sound odd because if I have a podcast, surely I have no trouble talking into a microphone, one would say.
That’s true to an extent, but for the most part I’m very OCD about how I produce content, especially the spoken variety. Some people are much better suited to freewheeling when it coms to talking but I need to be prepared and generally I put the time in producing scripts beforehand, at least for the filler parts like intros, outros and links between segments.
I normally let my guest select the themes from the match in question so what I do is let them harp on them for about 5 minutes or so then we have some back and forth, but I also have what I call my “must mention list” which is a set of points I want to make sure get brought up and although the guest hits most of them anyway, I can offer the rest. So when called upon to do the solo I ended up just going through the list point by point and hey presto I had myself a show.
Anyway my point here is that probably the biggest reason for my improved confidence in these situations is my weekly gig on DublinSouthFM with David Nolan. For full disclosure I had received offers for gigs like these a few times over the years and turned them down, telling people I was too busy and such when the real reason a was a big fat chicken! I guess the thought of not having control over the narrative of an interview spooked me and I preferred to stay in my comfort zone of setting the talking points myself.
But by the time David approached my for this DSFM spot I was well aware that I was long overdue facing this particular fear, so I took it on and now I really enjoy doing it. I mean it’s hardly This Week In Politics…the subject matter is something I know about anyway and more often than not we chat within an hour of finishing my recording for the preview show so it’s not like the subject isn’t fresh in my mind.
HARPIN' ON RUGBY 