TV View: Dark days for football loathers, dark days indeed. There's probably not much more you can take of setting your video for your weekly gardening programme only to end up with 30 minutes of Bulgaria v Denmark instead.

Mind you, if they'd been available to him, the Bulgarian coach might have opted for a back four of Percy Thrower, Alan Titchmarsh, Diarmuid Gavin and Charlie Dimmock.

As the BBC man put it after Bulgaria had lost, dismally, for the second time, "They are making as big an impact in these championships as they did in the last, and they didn't qualify for those."

The gardeners, though, had plenty of alternatives to association football on television last week, like Gaelic football, so they can have no complaints. And their parched shrubs would have got a much-needed watering in Clones yesterday too.

"These lads would have been training in balmy heat the last few weeks, then they come to Clones and just as they're getting off the team bus the showers come down," said Kevin McStay, as he watched the water levels rise in his commentary box before the Donegal v Tyrone game, with Marty Morrissey doing the bailing out in the background. "The ruin has rained the game," as Jimmy Smyth tried to put it over on BBC Northern Ireland.

This one, of course, was never going to be a contest. Indeed it was a surprise that Donegal had the temerity to show up, a view that might well have been shared by the man who rang Liveline last week to complain about the Armagh v Tyrone Ulster final being played at Croke Park, rather than Clones.

Jarlath Burns, then, gave everyone a bit of a giggle when he tipped Donegal on the BBC, while Joe Brolly was displaying his penchant for comedy back on RTÉ at half-time when he suggested that the game was "sitting pretty for a Donegal upset". That was 14-man Donegal, whose forwards, in the first half, had displayed all the accuracy of the Bulgarian attack.

There was much discussion at half-time about Niall McCready's sending off, but Joe Brolly was more annoyed with Tyrone's Owen Mulligan, accusing him of trying to get the Donegal man put off - further evidence, he reckoned, of football going down the soccer route.

"It's a poison through the game, we just can't have it . . . are we going to end up spitting over each other?" he asked, his glasses steaming up with fury.

Michael Lyster tried to lighten things and mollify Brolly by drawing attention to Donegal's "streamlined jerseys", which, he assumed, they wore so opponents couldn't grab a hold of them. "No," said Brolly, "they're strictly for the girls."

He wasn't, it should be stressed, alleging that Colm McFadden and Brendan Devenney, for example, are girls, just that they now have a Fabio Cannavaro and Alessandro Nesta look about them.

"Non-stick jerseys," he called them, like Donegal were a set of frying pans.

Well, the second half had barely started when it was looking suspiciously like the ticket printers would have to Tippex out "Eoghain" after "Tír" and replace it with "Chonaill", just the 80,000 times.

Tyrone, as it proved, were out of the frying pan of that Armagh encounter and into the fire of the qualifiers.

A great week for Donegal, then, but not so great for David Duval. Nor for those of us who put 50 cent on him to win the US Open, based on the assumption that he would have been working hard on his game since his last appearance in November. After rounds of 83 and 82 we can only assume he's devoted his time to gardening since then.

If fairness to our man David, Shinnecock Hills did look a bit tricky, to the point where Ernie Els told Sky Sports after his third round that "it feels like a train just hit me". Sore thing.

Claire Coughlan had no such troubles in the Curtis Cup, the highlights of which were shown on the BBC yesterday, a mere week after the event. No rush, lads.

The Cork woman completed her debut in the competition with a perfect winning record, one that impressed Peter Alliss, who, nonetheless, insisted on referring to her as Claire "Colon". Presumably if she'd won half her matches she'd have been Claire Semi-Colon.

But all eyes, of course, were on America's latest sporting megastar, Michelle Wie. Ecstatic after helping her country retain the Curtis Cup, she revealed that she'd dreamt of the moment "all my life".

A fleeting dream, then. She is, after all, only 14. You have to assume she spent the first 12 and a half years wondering quite what Barbie ever saw in Ken.