After 30 years as a Sunday Game pundit, Spillane’s legendary send-up of the All-Ireland final brawl remains one of the things he gets asked about mostMayo and Meath players forget about trying to play football during the 1996 All Ireland football final replay. Photograph: Inpho Wed Jun 17 2026 - 13:46 • 5 MIN READ“Here you have Colm Coyle hitting [Anthony] Finnerty. This is Colm’s first punch. Finnerty, delayed reaction, sees Martin O’Connell coming around the corner and thinks that the best action is to go down.”Meath v Mayo, 1996. Mayo v Meath, 1996. The row. Always, the row.But this is not one of those pieces. Well, not really. The ins and outs and ups and downs of the All-Ireland final replay brawl of 30 years ago are a raddled husk at this stage. Pat McEnaney, Liam McHale, Colm Coyle – everyone has told the story a million times. An old dishcloth with every last drop wrung out.We turn instead to Pat Spillane. Everyone’s favourite pain in the hoop is 70 now, as full of mischief and delight as ever he was. He retired from the Sunday Game in 2022 but he’s still podcasting away and his Sunday World column has been running for a frankly astonishing 35 years without missing a week.“Here, Liam McHale arrives. Jumps in and a wonderful gap opens up. He hits no one at all and goes straight through. But unfortunately, the entire county of Meath seemed to come on top of him and the poor man got an awful killing in this incident. And all hell broke loose.”Spillane was on TV for three decades, hundreds of matches, millions of words. He was loved and hated in equal measure, often in the same breath, frequently by the same people. And now, in his retirement, he still gets stopped and asked about two things above all. Puke Football and The Row.“I’ve often thought that if I turned up at the Ploughing Championships some year with 5,000 T-shirts that had Puke Football written on them, I’d sell every one of them,” he says. “But still, nine times out of 10, when I get stopped by people and talk about The Sunday Game, the thing they remember the most is either that or the row.”So let’s set the scene. Last Sunday in September 1996. The replay ends in victory for Meath and yet another vale of tears for Mayo. But all anyone wants to talk about is the knock-down-drag-out fight in the fifth minute. And the sixth minute. And the seventh, which was how long it took for McEnaney to restore order and pick McHale and Coyle out to give them the line.By night-time, The Sunday Game has to address it. “Pat Spillane,” begins Michael Lyster. “Talk me through this brawl. What did you make of it? Because this was ugly…”But instead of clutching his pearls and going into full Archbishop McQuaid mode, Spillane went the other way. He was 40 years old, not that long retired, impish to a fault. So he set off on a three-minute commentary of the footage from that afternoon, enjoying himself all the more as it went along.“The umpire came out at this but in his wisdom, he removes himself again. At this stage, everyone is at it… In the background you can see some wonderful punches. A couple of great examples of slow waltzes and whatever like that.”Thirty years on, he’s adamant he had no choice on the night. In the hours between the game ending and The Sunday Game highlights show going on, they’d watched the passage of play back four or five times. He decided early that people weren’t tuning in to be told that fighting was bad. They knew that already. This was ripe for sending up.“It wouldn’t have worked but for Michael Lyster,” he says. “The greatness of Michael Lyster was that he ran the best show in town and no one realised he was running it at all. He asked the question and when I started taking the piss, he didn’t jump in and go, ‘Ah now Pat, be serious.’ He knew this was entertainment. He had no interest in being the star of the show.”Mayo and Meath players went 'totally berserk' in the 1996 All-Ireland football final replay, says Pat Spillane. Photograph: Billy Stickland/Inpho “Here in this bit, watch Jimmy McGuinness, the number eight. He arrives on the scene. He exercises his right leg a little bit here, stretching I presume. Continues on then and he meets Colm McMenamin. Watch him there, he’s looking for a little bit of action. He looks around, tries to trip some fella, runs along and who does he meet but the unfortunate Colm McMenamin.”The planets aligned, in a way. Spillane was helped by the fact that his panel partner on the night was Tony Davis. Solid, dependable, well-mannered. Happy to let his Kerry friend freewheel away.“If it was a few years later and [Joe] Brolly was there, no chance would it have happened,” Spillane says. “He’d have been interrupting every 20 seconds. We’d have ended up arguing and the clip would have run and it would have been forgotten about. Tony was there, Tony wasn’t saying much. Michael knew it was good. And away we went.“I felt defined by my role on The Sunday Game, like I was this cranky, opinionated guy, the Dunphy of the GAA, etc. But I’m not the angry fella at all. Anybody who knows me knows I’m a piss-taker.“And that was one of the rare occasions when the thing we were looking at was so f*****g bad that you couldn’t but take the piss out of it. If it was an isolated punch, you could pick it out and go, ‘This is terrible.’ But they went totally berserk! So that by the fourth or fifth time watching it, I was saying, ‘We can’t be too po-faced about this, lads.’”“[McGuinness] does a nice little sumo wrestling impersonation here. Fair play to McMenamin, he held his ground and McGuinness couldn’t drop him. So McGuinness leaves McMenamin but it wasn’t all over. In a short, while you’ll see him return, he’s saying, ‘I must finish off this fella.’ And he’d make Michael Flatley eat his heart out because this is a wonderful high-leg action here, a wonderful stretch in his right foot.[ Darragh Ó Sé: Ger Brennan has made a big mistake ahead of Donegal clashOpens in new window ]All these years on, the clip has found a second life on the internet. He’s been sent it half a dozen times since Monday morning. Watching it now, it feels impossible that Spillane or his equivalent would be given the leeway to go off on one like that now. Whether that’s a good thing or not is probably in the eye of the beholder.[ Let’s talk about the GAA and a dangerously stupid culture of violenceOpens in new window ]“I decided that the way I was going to do it was to treat it like I was looking out the window of a pub at a fight that was going on in the street and describe what was happening to the lads sitting inside. The only way to do it was to have some fun with it.”IN THIS SECTION