TV view: Golfers in a spin as Gary Neville’s view on officials goes full cycle

You’d have been left wondering what kind of mishaps Mark Roe has endured in his utility room down the years when he commented on a missed putt by Frenchman Tom Vaillant at the Challenge Tour Grand Final in Mallorca on Sunday afternoon. “What he’s going through today,” he said, “it’s like being in a washing machine and you can’t climb out.”

It’s probably unlikely that many viewers of Sky’s coverage of the tournament had ever witnessed a human struggling to climb out of a washing machine – a cat, maybe – but if they had, then Vaillant’s expression when he missed that putt – despair, anxiety, frustration, like he’d just been rinsed and then violently spun – might have looked familiar.

Most of us are golfing bandwagoners, only ever tuning in when it’s a major or, at a stretch, the Ryder or Solheim Cup, but the Challenge Tour Grand Final had the look of an event where the prize was so unimaginably large for the competitors, the drama would be high. And so it proved.

This is where we copy and paste Philip Reid to make it sound like we know what we’re talking about: “Conor Purcell – the only Irish player in the field – has his fate in his own hands in the quest for a precious full card on the DP World Tour ... all 45 players in the tournament have a mathematical chance of claiming a golden ticket to the main circuit ... Purcell is currently 36th on the order of merit and will need to leapfrog his way into the top 20 to claim the prized card.”

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You don’t, of course, want to be too parochial about these things, so when Katie McCabe played Stina Blackstenius through for Arsenal’s 87th-winner against Manchester City on Sunday, there’s no way cries of “if you’re Irish, come into the parlour” went up from this couch.

Similarly, there’s no way that Sky was cussed from the high heavens – as if – for showing as much of our Conor’s final round as they do of, say, the eighth division of Icelandic football.

Until the 13th hole, all we saw of the Dubliner was him bouncing up and down the on-screen leader board, without ever knowing what was happening with his round, the first glimpse of him coming at the 13th when he sank a putt to move him up to 28th on the “Road to Mallorca” rankings. It was a rollercoaster thereafter, Purcell finally finishing 29th in those rankings, Mark promising us that he’s so gifted he will secure his card in the qualifying school thingie.

Vaillant had a happier day of it, a birdie on the 15th sending him on his way to a second-place finish, enough to wrap up that DP World Tour card. “Rock on Tommy,” as Mark hollered.

But Lord, the pressure on these fellas, a putt lipping out the difference between them being able to make a decent living from the sport next year on the DP World Tour or scrapping their way through the division below. Brandon Robinson Thompson missed a putt on the 18th, which left him at 22nd in the rankings, one place away from earning his spot on that Tour. He had the look of somebody trapped in a washing machine.

As did poor old Khiara Keating, the Manchester City goalkeeper, who had the mother of all ‘mares when she misjudged the bounce of McCabe’s pass – “Zombie, zombie, zombie-ie-ie-ie” – to Blackstenius and let the ball sail over her head. Goal.

At least that was one Arsenal side that had a happy time of it at the weekend, the smoke still rising from Mikel Arteta’s head after his lads lost, a touch controversially, to Newcastle.

The humanoids working the VAR machine, it would be fair to say, are having their struggles at the moment, the effusive apologies for errors not quite making up for the lost points. “But it’s not right to jump on the bandwagon with VAR and just batter people at Stockley Park,” Jamie Carragher insisted before Liverpool’s draw with Chiedozie Ogbene.

And then his mate Gary Neville took to X, the artist formerly known as Twitter, to ask for some respect for the officials. The giggling you hear in the background is from those who recall how his lads handled officials back in the day. By full time, they felt like they’d been trapped in a washing machine and couldn’t climb out.