TV VIEW:  The Commonwealth Games are over and you have to wonder if anyone on this side of the Irish Sea noticed. But we always have been a bit chippy about the Brits. A peculiar competition, which is worldly but not global, writes Johnny Watterson

A mix of standards from Australian swimming sensation Ian Thorpe to one African who had never put a foot in a swimming pool in his preparations for the games, it's a sort of mini Olympics for Manchester, a consolation prize for not bagging the Olympic Games proper.

But when do you ever get to see table-tennis on television, or hockey or rugby sevens? Not on RTÉ unless you drop them a substantial wedge or convince them that people are interested in watching and advertising around it. The Commonwealth Games are like a lottery win for minority sports. One of the biggest women's sports in the country (Britain and Ireland), hockey, actually gets exposure and if you watched the England women play India where a disputed goal was scored just on the hooter, controversy too.

Table-tennis fills the screen for almost an hour. Rugby sevens occupies an entire afternoon while a little weight-lifting in the middle just to vary the canvas surely enriches us, if only to reaffirm that thankfully we chose our own sports a little more carefully. At the risk of being ridiculed, it was all quite enjoyable on the BBC even if you didn't care who won or lost or what the rules were or what they were trying to do.

Table-tennis (seriously, only losers call it ping pong) on Friday showed how ignorantly complacent you can become about your minority sports even if you filled your teenage days in the school gym flicking top-spin backhands at the girl you fancied in English class. Clearly living in a sporting time warp, the game was shocking, bewildering and bemusing. It took some time to fathom.

They no longer wear plimsolls and players can now call a time-out in the middle of a game and go into a private huddle with their coach at the side of the net while everyone goes quiet and tries to listen to what they're saying.

You also serve twice before handing over to your opponent, not five times and the games are won at 11 points, not 21, about half a game old style.

Needless to say, this all came as a surprise. The game of our youth; the green piece of chipboard that took up all the space in the play room; our wasted afternoons after school; our Tuesday and Thursday nights of endless 21-point games broken only with cups of tea and club-milk biscuits; the only real sport available to an active kid on a rainy day. Like many other sports it appears to have become bastardised and tarted up for quick -bite viewing.

Alex Perry showed that even with an unimposing physical presence, you can still be compelling in the bite-sized game. Adopting a martial arts pose before each serve, the English player was more Karate Kid than Johnny Leech (the only table -tennis name that comes to mind). His bat was fatter than a cheeseburger but as he shovelled the ball over the net at the execution, you could only marvel at the complexity of the movement designed simply to deceive his opponent.

A flurry then followed in a passage of play where both players reacted like cats with a ball of wool, the squeak of their rubber soles on the floor evocative of musty school-hall days. Perry at one stage was backing into the hoarding, fetching these killer drives that his challenger Roy, with both feet off the ground, was smashing at him. Unperturbed, Perry just rolled them back, chopping the ball 20 feet, his back literally against the wall.

The weight-lifting came as a pleasant interlude on BBC 2 just as a flurry of commotion centred on the ball, which appeared to have punctured. The lifters, somewhat disappointingly, no longer have fantastic beer guts and appear to have given up on those magnificent breakfasts commentators enthralled us with in the old days - three chickens, a dozen eggs, 16 pancakes and a small child washed down with a gallon of skimmed milk. Like the table-tennis ball, they did look like bursting as they strained to clean and jerk 35 stone over their heads. Canada's bespectacled Julian Galipeau had the face of a gynaecologist and the legs of Tyrannosaurus Rex.

"He hasn't locked. That won't count. But he has a very good snatch," we were told. John Inverdale had us all thinking the same thing as Galipeau staggered around the lifting podium, his arms raised with 35 stone of steel threatening to buckle his joints and propel him into the audience.

Rubbing his knees with his hands, Inverdale leant towards the camera to whisper to us, somewhat needlessly: "as you can imagine weight-lifting puts tremendous pressure on the joints." Phew. Time out.