Interview Ger Gilroy: Mary Hannigan talks to the presenter of Newstalk 106's nightly sports discussion programme

It's four minutes to seven. Off The Ball starts at 7 p.m. - that's 240 seconds to kick-off. Not that anyone appears to be counting. To the untrained eye it looks like the team might still be in the dressing- room when the whistle blows, the listeners tuning in to an eerie silence, but Ger Gilroy and his cohorts are a picture of serenity.

If there's any feeling of panic as the clock appears to speed up, it's well concealed. Any feverish activity is of the controlled and productive variety. Only the fly on the wall is fretting. Frantically so.

"Do you age 10 years every night," the show's one full-time researcher, Ciarán Murphy, is asked by the edgy fly, whose eyes are anxiously fixed on the time. "Ah no," he laughs, as the clock ticks to 6.57, "by seven the work is done." Three minutes left, then, to finalise the preparations for a show that lasts three hours. Three hours, mark you. But Murphy gives the impression that three minutes is more than plenty. If he smoked cigars he'd probably have a Hamlet moment. If it wasn't for Micheál Martin.

Three minutes more than plenty? The fly has its doubts, but marvels at the calm.

Maybe it's a youth thing. Maybe only 30-somethings-plus worry about hastily-approaching deadlines. At 27, Gilroy, presenter of Off The Ball, is the elder statesman of the team, the line-up of which is completed by Murphy, producer Mark Horgan, football correspondent Ken Early, Cian Murtagh and Killian Ormond, who, between them, fill the second researcher's job. And there's Sinéad Kissane and Eoin McDevitt, one of whom does the newsround with Murphy at the start of each show.

Gilroy does a last-minute check.

"Burnley/Liverpool going ahead?"

"Yep."

"We're okay with the Paolo Leonardi interview?"

"Yep."

"The Connacht rugby story - we have John Fallon?"

"Yep."

"Great."

And, with that, he ambles down to the studio. He's in his chair, headphones on, as the whistle blows. The fly picks itself up off the floor and mops its brow. And wonders quite how they managed it. Full steam ahead. Ready to go. Not a bother.

But, as Gilroy points out, Off The Ball, now three years old, has amassed 1,600 hours of air-time on Dublin station Newstalk 106. It never quite puts itself together - human intervention is still required - but, he says, it's compiled effortlessly enough, the team know what their doing by now.

It began life on Newstalk as a two-hour show, ending at nine, at which point a BBC comedy hour took over. "But no one was listening to the comedy so we figured we may as well stay on 'til 10", says Gilroy. "Football matches don't finish 'til near 10 anyway - when we were only two hours we would take people up to half-time and then have to say: 'But we won't be here to tell you the final score'. Seven to 10 is perfect."

But seven to 10, by our calculations, amounts to three hours. How, Gilroy is oft asked, do you fill three hours . . . five nights a week? It's not difficult, he insists, largely because of the "never a dull moment" quality to the world of sport. Just when it seems nothing much is happening, a controversy/scandal/majorly monumental story springs from nowhere.

And even if it's quiet there's a format to the show which provides a framework for the week, around which current happenings can be slotted in.

Reviews and previews of the weekend's events take up much of Mondays and Fridays, days that also feature a horse-racing round-up with Donn McClean. On Tuesdays, Maurice Murphy and Séamus Sweeney fill the media hour with a "Mediawatch" section and book/video/DVD reviews.

Wednesday's middle hour is taken up with the Legend's Interview, one of Off The Ball's most successful features; there's the John Giles Football Show on a Thursday, followed by The Rugby Hour or The Eircom League Show, depending on the time of year. There's Friday Night Fights the following night, as well as occasional live coverage of Leinster rugby matches.

Fans' forums, comedy and trivia, nostalgia pieces (This Week In . . .), nightly features - it could be said that Off The Ball is what "sports lovers who enjoy radio" find when they expire, go to heaven, fiddle with the dial on their celestial radio and stumble upon 106 FM at 7 p.m. each weekday evening.

SO, WHERE did its presenter spring from? To his slight bemusement - not least because he was once told by a former employer at FM 104 that he didn't have a voice for radio - Gilroy now finds himself as, well, the voice of Ireland's only nightly sports radio show.

When he interviewed Joe Queenan, author of True Believers: The Tragic Inner Life of Sports Fans on Tuesday night, Gilroy was well qualified to relate to the torment experienced by his guest's life as a supporter of teams that never, if ever, amount to much.

"Well, I'm from Athy," he says, leaving it there, evidently reluctant to review Kildare's overall record in the Leinster championship since his birth. "And I had the misfortune to be taken to see Aston Villa as a child. Paul McGrath, that day, was even better than (Roy) Keane against Portugal and Holland. So that was it. I supported Villa."

Sympathetic glances are exchanged. Gilroy nods. Nothing more needs to be said.

At least his parents, both Antrim by birth, had brushes with sporting success. His father, Gerry, was a hurler of some repute, and later coached Antrim's minor team. His mother, though, is the sporting pride of the family. Eileen McGrogan, a contemporary of President Mary McAleese in school, was on the Antrim team that ended Dublin's dominance of camogie in 1967, winning an All-Ireland medal.

Their son, alas, was never touched by such sporting ecstasy. He did, though, leave Trinity with a degree in English, an accomplishment that enabled him to conclude - and we could have this wrong, it's a blur - after an on-air chat with Ken Early about Liverpool's Djimi Traore's own goal against Burnley, that: "Why should I fear death? If I am, death is not. If death is, I am not. Why should I fear that which can only exist when I do not?" Epicurus (341-270 BC).

Not that we needed to look it up. It's how Rafael Benitez would have expressed himself after the game if only he had the Epicurean words to do it.

While in Trinity, Gilroy was the sports editor of the college paper, combining that undertaking with stints with FM 104 and Independent Network News (INN). When he left college he joined the newly launched Setanta.com and, from there, moved to TradeSports, the Internet "trading and betting exchange".

And then Daire O'Brien, one of the founders of Setanta.com who "came in as a troubleshooter and one of the main presenters at the start" at Newstalk, gave Gilroy his break at the station.

"They didn't quite say 'here's two hours, do what you want', it was more 'here's two hours, please do some good work'," says Gilroy. "It was a great challenge, though. We could have gone a couple of different ways. We started out defining ourselves by not being things that currently existed, i.e., Sportscall, i.e., just having callers and not doing proper analysis.

"What had worked best on sports radio in Ireland until then was that final hour of The Last Word on a Friday when Eamon (Dunphy) was presenting. So we decided to try and do something similar to that, without aping it because we had to be ourselves. But the aim was to try and definitely be anything but Sportscall.

"There's a certain 'low-fi' quality to what we do. I was listening to sport on BBC radio the other day and each sentence was perfectly pronounced, it sounded like it was almost written in iambic pentameter, it was clear the guy was reading from a script. We don't have scripts because people don't talk about sport in a scripted way - and if they do something has gone wrong."

"I don't ever want to get to that stage where everything is perfect. Yeah, a massive budget would be great, but the most important thing is that we focus on how good we can be."

FOR GILROY, as a downcast Villa devotee, the David O'Leary analogy is irresistible. Limited funds, so what do you do? Whinge incessantly about it, thus demoralising the "players" you have by telling them they can never, ever compete with the best, or get on with it, live within your means, use your imagination to get the most out of what you have?

"We have three hours air time every night in Dublin: you either see that as something that's intimidating or else you say, 'brilliant, we have three hours every night to tell people what we want to tell them about'.

"If you become depressed by the fact that we can't pay people to come in, the fact that we don't have seven researchers, one for every day of the week, then you're not going to make entertaining radio and it's not going to be informed either. I just think this is a really big chance, an opportunity for everybody. The team is young, they see it as a chance, rather than being intimidated by the size of the operation."

Newstalk's own blurb on Gilroy says he has "an unhealthy obsession with sport".

He probably does, but his passion for it and his appreciation of its value is tempered by a refreshing sense of perspective.

"Someone, by text, was criticising us the other night for not savaging our guests, but there are very few of our guests we need to savage," he says. "This isn't politics, people have differences of opinions but they don't necessarily have a very important role to play in our lives, being part of the entertainment industry."

Off The Ball does, though, have a happy knack of attracting guests of some quality and seamless significance to the topic being discussed. Henry Cooper, for example, turned up during the week on a Muhammad Ali special, speaking freely not just of his 1963 "decking" of Cassius Clay, but of his life since. And, rarely, has Cooper been asked to talk of any part of his life since Clay rose from the canvas to win their bout.

Bearing in mind their budget and their small team of researchers, how do they get these guests? "We just have a brilliant team, we figure we can get to anyone within four or five phone calls," says Gilroy. "We've made good enough contacts at this stage with people who've spoken to people we want to speak to - and they trust us not to bandy the number about and they trust us to respect the guests."

Those interviews and features add substantial meat to a show that attempts to blend irreverence with a weightier slant on sport, with its three hours split between news, fun and features. It's occasionally chaotic, often has a college radio feel to it.

Some listeners complain of too much muttering and mumbling, an amateurish lack of slickness, but that's part of the charm. If your tipple is silky scripted smoothness, Off The Ball is not your thing.

And when it comes to irreverence, the show's texters rarely let it down.

Wednesday.

Text from Ciarán: "My mate and his girlfriend love shagging when they listen to your show."

Ger: "That's great Ciarán, thanks."

Ken Early: "That's lovely."

Try as you might, you just can't imagine Jimmy Magee reading out a similar message on RTÉ's Sunday Sport. Nor, indeed, receiving one.

THE FUTURE for Gilroy? A national audience, rather than the confinements of Newstalk's current Dublin reach, is the dream. "But it would have to be with Newstalk, because I've built this sports department, I'm the sports editor, I've given it three years of my life, so I don't really want to walk away from it.

"It would be fantastic if we got a national licence, but at the same time there's room for us to plot a course through Dublin. It's a Dublin station, so it's something people who live and work in Dublin and who come from Dublin can identify with."

And with that the fly looks at its watch. Three minutes to Gilroy's pre-Off The Ball handover with George Hook.

Loads of time. Where's your hurry?