TV VIEW: SO THEN, Spain and Italy. Not to mention Croatia, which many people haven't. Mind you, not everyone woke in a cold sweat the morning after the night before, after enduring eight hours of Xavi Hernandez and Andrea Pirlo bearing down on them. The night terrors, they call it.

And not everyone woke clinging to the hope that the Euro 2012 draw had just been a very, very bad dream. There are some who are looking on the bright side of it all, although they’ve yet to detail precisely what the bright side is.

But, come Saturday morning on Football Focus, our presenter, Dan Walker, suggested the bright side might just be Giovanni Trapattoni.

“He’s a wily old goat, isn’t he?” he asked Rafa Benitez, a compliment that left Rafa looking a bit puzzled. His grasp of English is not yet of a standard that would allow him comprehend why being likened to an ageing, hairy, horned and oftentimes cantankerous animal could possibly be a good thing.

He decided, then, to let the goat thing go, but, with Steve Staunton sitting on the couch beside him, was very nice about Ireland and Trapattoni, telling us the reaction in the Spanish press to the draw was generally one of reverence for our manager’s experience and a little wariness about coming up against his team. So, that was good.

Over to John Motson at White Hart Lane to get his verdict. Motty, incidentally, was giving a debut to a brand new sheepskin coat, which looked remarkably similar to the sheepskin coats he’s been wearing since Trapattoni was a kid. A greenhorn, if you like.

“It was made to measure by a guy called Tony Cox,” he beamed, but while it was chilly in London, it wasn’t Siberian stuff, for which the coat was evidently designed, so by the end of his chat with Dan, Motty had wilted, nigh on drowning in his own perspiration.

But what of Ireland?

“I think they will go and enjoy themselves and do themselves justice,” he gushed. Now, see, that might well be true, but it’s the class of talk that would get your (wily old) goat, like all we’ll be seeking in Polkraine are pints and not points.

Dan was similarly – and, no doubt, unintentionally – impolite, kind of intimating that it would be great to have the Irish supporters back on the big stage, if not the Irish team, the implication being that we’re still hoofin’ it and putting ’em under pressure after all these years, and that our boys wouldn’t know tiki-taka football from a cheeseburger.

Again, there might be a smidgen of truth in the assertion, but, a bit like Trapattoni’s team, you can get overly defensive and respond with prickly cries like: “And Gareth Barry is Lionel Messi? Ha!”

Motty and his sheepskin coat then turned their attention to England’s draw.

“I may not sound very patriotic, but I think it’s a rotten group,” he said, going against the general consensus of his media colleagues who reckon France, Sweden and Ukraine will be a doddle.

“And if they get through who do they play? Spain or Italy! Goodness me!”

Eh, hello?

Rafa nodded. “I agree with John . . . Hotsen?”

All: “Motson!”

Rafa: “Motston, sorry. Yes, if you progress you have to play against Spain or Italy, so it will be tough for England.”

Cough.

You know, maybe it was the perfect draw after all. They already have ourselves and Croatia on the flight home, prompting Slaven Bilic and Trap to engage in a little bit of high-we’ll-show-’em-fiving.

Although, over on CNN, German old-boy Thomas Berthold wasn’t holding out much hope for anyone who comes up against Spain. “All ze players zey has in midfield, bum bum bum bum, and you are running behind, you’re dead,” he said.

Ruud Gullit agreed. “And Fabregas is also only on the bench!”

“I know,” Berthold giggled, Ruud and himself proceeding to ROFL.

Their host, Pedro Pinto, chuckled too, but not too heartily; he was still wiping the sleep from his eyes after visiting all the Polkraine venues, his travels seeming a touch interminable.

When he arrived in Lviv, in western Ukraine, he noted work on the new airport terminal was still under way.

“How many hours a day do you work here,” he asked Mykola Magasevych, the “Lviv Airport development director”.

“Three shifts, approximately 20 hours for each,” said Mykola, readjusting the matchsticks under his eyelids.

“Wow,” said Pedro, “how much pressure has there been on you?”

“I was like you when it started,” said Mykola, pointing to Pedro’s head, which was in or around a foot higher than his own. Shrivelled, he was.

This Euro 2012 business? On and off the pitch, an ordeal. But it will, you’d imagine, separate the sheep from the wily old goats.