TV VIEW:WE COULDN'T but pray that the Wicklow woman who wrote to The Irish Times last week, complaining about the misery guts on the RTÉ panel after the win over Georgia, wasn't tuned in yesterday to hear a third of the rugby panel share his feelings following the triumph in Rome.
She would, we’re guessing, have put her remote control in the microwave, just to ensure it would never function again, lest she accidentally stumble upon RTÉ2 while channel surfing.
It was Steve Staunton who once said “a win is a win if you win it”, after we drew, and if you belong to that school of thinking then you’d have been in agreement with Tom McGurk when he declared post-match: “Five tries, nothing to complain about.”
But, you know yourself: red rag to a bull. While Brent Pope and Conor O’Shea were less than ecstatic about the performance, five tries and a win had left them quite content. The other fella? “IF THEY SAY AFTER THE MATCH ‘WE KNEW ITALY WOULD BE HARD TO BEAT’ I’LL VOMIT ON MY JAFFA CAKES – THIS IS ITALY FOR CRYING OUT LOUD!” But, FIVE tries? “But two of them were INTERCEPTS,” said George, leaving Brent and Conor to battle it out in a who-can-sigh-the-loudest contest. Brent reminded George, just in case he’d missed it, that Ireland had actually won. George thanked Brent profusely for the information, but said he knew already.
To be honest, things had been tetchy between Brent and George since Saturday when Tom revealed that the panel had received two Valentine cards between them, “both of them for Brent”. Brent, in fairness, was modest about it – although modest isn’t a word you could use for his tie, a kind of a shiny Barbie pink – but George wore the expression of a man who was feeling no love at all from the viewing public. Certainly not from the woman in Wicklow who’d probably microwave him too, given half a chance.
Mercifully, George’s Jaffas were spared because Declan Kidney opted not to go down the “we knew Italy would be hard to beat and a win is a win if you win it” route after the game. “And that’s why I didn’t have a problem with my confectionary – because Kidney was quite factual,” he said, before reiterating his displeasure with the afternoon’s showing.
No love lost then, which seamlessly takes us back to Semple Stadium on Saturday evening. “Poisonous, never-ending and depressing,” said Daire O’Brien of the Cork hurling dispute which, by now, makes Saipan look like a bit of argy-bargy over a parking spot.
Seanie McGrath, in the Setanta studio, admitted, ahead of the Tipperary v Cork league game, that “some of the Cork public are probably willing (their own team) to lose”, which kind of gave us blow-ins to the dispute a feel for the passions that have been roused.
Indeed, we witnessed one such Cork supporter, who previously viewed Tipperary hurling as the work of Satan, stopping just short of singing Slievenamon through the game, while tearfully cheering points scored by both teams. “D’you know,” we said, “you lot really need to sort this out.” “It has more sub-plots than an episode of Lost,” said Daire, and that was saying something. Appropriately enough our favourite Lost character is Hurley, although we’re as confused about his mental state in Series Five as we are about the future of Cork hurling.
Any way, as Nicky English put it in the Setanta commentary box, “people were expecting a St Valentine’s Day massacre here”, but it didn’t quite prove to be. Back in the studio, at half-time, Eugene Magee put this down to “Tipperary players playing arrogant, they’re going around trying to put jam on every pass . . . they’ve been too smart-arsed with some of their play”, which left us wishing Eugene would speak his mind.
The gap was 12 points in the end, which – sign of the times – was, poignantly enough, nigh on a triumph for the young Cork side.
Setanta’s post-match interview with Gerald McCarthy, though, further educated us blow-ins, if we weren’t sure why this dispute hasn’t been resolved by now his comments, somewhat less than pacifying, explained why the striking players remain somewhat reluctant to return to his regime.
“A lot of players have walked away from Cork hurling,” he said, “in my opinion they’ve left the red jersey down.” But 10,000 to 12,000 marched in support of the players in Cork last weekend? “Any Saturday you walk down Patrick Street there’ll be a few thousand people walking around there any way,” he said.
Depressing’s the only word. But now us blow-ins understand why there’s been no resolution.
