TV View: Over on the BBC, England's Ben Cohen was explaining how he'd temporarily lost his appetite for rugby. "The only way I can describe it is, if you love chocolate and you have it every day, you just get bored with it," he said.

Funny that: by full time at Lansdowne Road the RTÉ panel of George Hook, Brent Pope and Conor O'Shea kind of had chocolate on their minds too.

The All Blacks, they agreed, were from Mars, or maybe even another Galaxy, making Curly Wurleys of our Irish boys. A Time Out would have been nice for the home team, just to catch their breath, but the visitors, a bunch of Smarties, pursued their Bounty ruthlessly: the humiliation of their hosts.

In fairness, there were no Snickers from New Zealand at full time, they let their rugby do the talking. What did we get for our perseverance in the face of this onslaught? Buttons. Titans all, the All Blacks - MacDonald, Mauger, Mealamu, McCaw, and they were just the M&Ms.

All George could conclude at the end of the drubbing was that Irish rugby was neither one thing nor the other. Be-Twix and between, if you like.

Okay, enough. But there are few things that can cheer the soul after a day like Saturday, and chocolate is one of them.

George, though, saw it coming. "Getting hit by a Polynesian is like getting hit by a dumper truck," he said of some of the All Blacks' particularly big lads, "getting hit by an Irish player is like getting hit by a Lada."

Brent chuckled, agreed the Polynesians were quite large, but then suggested they could be "lazy", and was rescued from this most regrettable of conversational routes only by Tom McGurk side-stepping him and passing the ball back to George.

By then Tom had asked George for "one last conversation" about that tackle.

"Well, I hope it is the last one," he sighed. "I think Brian O'Driscoll is in danger of being a whinger - it was first of all to deflect from an incompetent Lions coach and then it coincided with the launch of a book," he said, intimating (a) he still has some slight doubts about Clive Woodward's greatness and (b) that somehow O'Driscoll's publishers were less than distraught about the publicity his book was receiving in light of the comments contained within about that tackle. He's awful cynical, our George.

Spooky. Roughly around the same time the very same Brian O'Driscoll was being interviewed over on the BBC, and that tackle came up in the chat. Now, we're with Tom on this one - "I thought it was the most disgraceful thing I ever saw on a rugby pitch. If you (Brent) and I did that to George we'd get five years in jail." - but Brian blaming the media for the incident still being a topic of conversation, by focusing on the extracts of his book where he talks about the incident, and talks some more about the incident? Ah, Brian. Do we look like complete Whole Nuts? Cough.

The publishers' own promo for the book: "O'Driscoll's account of dislocating his shoulder in the first minute of the first Lions Test - and his unsparing assessment of the tackle that caused the injury and of the 'one-eyed' rugby culture that, he believes, makes such tackles possible - is searing, uncompromising and heartbreaking."

Anyway.

Tom was alone in still feeling emotional about the tackle, as George, Brent and Conor felt it was time to move on. Starting with Saturday's game.

"It's not their second team, but it's not their first," Tony Ward reassured us.

We took this to mean it was the All Blacks' third team, but, in hindsight, we think he might have meant it was their 1.5 selection. And that is a comfort, of sorts.

Back on the BBC, Jim Neilly was pining for a familiar face at Lansdowne Road. Not Brian O'Driscoll, but the President of Ireland. "It doesn't seem the same without her elegant figure coming bobbing out," he said, in a plaintive sort of way.

From this we deduced President McAleese had a ticket for the North Terrace and, so, had to stay at home, but Jim told us she was a bit under the weather.

Which, come full time, was how Irish supporters felt.

"What changes would you make, George, for the Australia game?" asked Tom.

"I'd make a change at tighthead, at hooker, at secondrow, at 6 and 7, at 12 and 11 - they're the changes I'd make," he said.

George wants a settled team for Australia, then. Most of all he wants our tackling to improve, ideally it will be Golden and Crisp. Countless Crunchie tackles that will leave the Aussies in a Twirl.