TV VIEW:BILL O'HERLIHY, we're guessing, is having himself fitted for his safari suit as we speak. Saturday night's draw in Bulgaria prompted him to jubilantly pirouette in his chair, an exuberance we really haven't seen since Ireland gobsmacked the Dutch at Lansdowne Road a whole eight years ago.

We’re picturing him fiddling about with Google Maps, plotting his route from Cape Town to Johannesburg, via Durban and Pretoria, wondering if he’ll bring his panel with him on his visit to Kruger National Park. He will worry, though, about Dunphy getting in to a heated argument with a spotted hyena, Souness tackling a Black Rhinoceros from behind, for old time’s sake, and Gilesie upsetting the wildebeest by declaring: “Would you look at the stupid head on him, Bill.”

And Ronnie confusing a giraffe for Niall Quinn.

If Ireland had qualified for the 2006 World Cup finals, RTÉ had planned to send the panel to Germany, but Ireland didn’t qualify so the panel spent the summer in Montrose.

The fear now is that because, like the rest of us, RTÉ is financially banjaxed, the panel mightn’t get to travel south at all. But as the Everly Brothers put it, “Drea-ea-ea-ea-eam, dream, dream, dream”, repeat to fade.

While conceding that the road to South Africa is littered with potential, last-minute Montenegro equalisers, Bill was euphoric after the draw, sensing the good days were back with a bang.

“Was this a great, great performance by the Irish,” he asked his panel.

“No,” said Gilesie.

That brought a halt to Bill’s swirling, but only fleetingly – nothing could suppress his joy.

It wasn’t that Gilesie doesn’t want to see the wildebeest, he made it clear he craves nothing more than for Ireland to make it to South Africa; it’s just his enthusiasm was a bit dampened by the team’s propensity for giving the ball away.

And, for Gilesie, losing possession is above lust, anger, gluttony, envy and sloth, and just below pride and covetousness, in the deadly sin list.

He was, he said, alarmed by Ireland “dropping off far too much” in the second half, an observation with which you could hardly quibble – there were times they dropped so deep the gap between midfield and the front lads was the size of Kruger National Park.

“It may not have been pretty, but it was effective,” Bill countered.

“I’m not worried about being pretty,” said Gilesie, which drew a chuckle from Ronnie and Dunphy.

Dunphy declared the draw to be a “great result”, but you sensed a but. Bill did too.

“You’re not enthusiastic though, are you?” he asked.

“I am! Hugely! No one wants us to get to South Africa more than I do,” he said, “but I’m not paid to wave green flags, Bill.”

Bill stood his ground, determined to remain exhilarated, noting that being only a point behind Italy and a whopping five ahead of Bulgaria in the tail-end of the campaign was quite marvellous.

“But it’s the worst Italian team ever and the Bulgarians have no real heart, they don’t really have it there in their gut,” said Dunphy.

Bill still refused to be deflated, but there must have been part of him that wished, at that moment, he’d opted to depart RTÉ for an easier life and, say, run in the Dublin South bye-election.

For now, though, his focus is on a campaign of a footballing kind, his slogan, Yes We Bloody Well Can Qualify For South Africa.

Undeterred, Bill showed a list of the remaining group fixtures, asking his panel for predictions. Cyprus away?

Dunphy: “A win, Bill.”

Bill: “Would everybody agree with that?”

Ronnie: No.”

Gilesie: “I’m not taking part in it, Bill.”

Bill to himself: “Jesus wept.”

Time for a quick post-match chat with Giovanni Trapattoni.

“Slow, slow, we build a very great team,” he told Tony O’Donoghue. The rest of the brief interview was largely a mystery to us.

Which reminds us of the moment in one of his press conferences in London, the week before last, when he mentioned that Shay Given had an injury. What, we asked, was the exact nature of the injury? Trapattoni half-lifted himself out of his seat and slapped his bottom. “You know, yes?” he said.

“Ah, yeah,” we lied.

To this day we don’t know if Given went in to the Bulgaria game with a wounded buttock – we settled on “hip” in the end, we thought it best – but it underlined for us the fact that this has been a campaign like no other.

Nelson Mandela once wrote a book entitled No Easy Walk to Freedom. If Ireland make it to South Africa, Bill, desperate to liberate himself from his Montrose shackles, might pen another tome by the same name.