TV VIEW: THAT was all a bit stressful. True, Sky News reported five weeks ago the alleged Lockerbie bomber had died and, as we speak, he's still breathing, so we probably should have known better than to fret. But still, when on Friday evening one of their people began a tribute to his contribution to golf with "Tiger Woods was . . ." it was hard not to get a bit of a sinking feeling.

Because you do, naturally enough, assume at times like this that they know more than they’re letting on; on Friday, as it turned out, they knew as much as ourselves: divil a bit.

But that BREAKING NEWS ticker has to be filled with something, and there are only so many times Sky can go with “DAVE CAMERON IS LOVELY, ISN’T HE?” We jest.

Even after getting word that he had just suffered the odd facial laceration or two, "TIGER WOODS SERIOUSLY INJURED" still screamed across our screens. Rumours, as it proved, that were immensely exaggerated. As the Sunday Timesso exquisitely put it yesterday, it was just a case of "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Hydrant".

It was, very nearly, Sky's Grannygate moment, an affair, as coincidence would have it, that was revisited last week by RTÉ's Scannal.

The highlight of the programme was that seminal Livelineexchange between Joe Duffy and one of Stephen Ireland's grannies, Patricia Tallon:

Joe: “When did you discover you were dead, Patricia?”

Patricia: “When I saw the paper, Joe. It isn’t everyone alive can see their death in the paper. I got an awful shock . . . but thank God I’m alive.”

Really rather magnificent and proof, if it were needed, that when we do sporting scannals we do them in a splendidly “you couldn’t make it up” kind of way.

Just ask Waterford Crystal or Lantinus.

Rumours of Liverpool’s Champions League demise were, meanwhile, confirmed midweek, leading to the RTÉ panel arming themselves with the necessary tools to conduct a post-mortem on Rafa Benitez’s Anfield reign.

Ronnie Whelan intervened at this stage, though, insinuating that sacking Rafa and his coaching staff (who, by the sounds of it, couldn’t be accommodated by Croke Park) would be so costly to Liverpool it’d put Dubai’s currents debts in the ha’penny place.

That’s an immense exaggeration on our part, but that’s what watching Sky News does to you.

Johnny Giles accepted Ronnie’s point and put his scalpel back in his pocket, but he had it out again when Billo Herlihy sort of suggested Rafa’s rubbish transfer record was partly down to the fact that no right-minded gifted footballer would want to join the club over their neighbours down the road.

“Manchester United have a mystique that is not matched by any team in England, so if I was a player in Albania, or somewhere like that, I would go to United before anywhere else,” he said.

“But who wants players from Albania, Bill?” asked Gilesie.

An aghast Bill pointed out that Sunderland have a very fine Albanian player in their ranks, Lorik Cana, but Gilesie seemed to feel the odd exception stopped short of proving any kind of rule.

“Albanian Galactico” was, to him, a rib-tickling oxymoron, leaving Bill envying Tom McGurk and his politically correct rugby panel.

“He only got the job because of the colour of his skin,” said George Hook of South African coach Peter de Villiers.

It’s a common enough (and very possibly true) allegation about de Villiers’ appointment, but it’s always amusing when it’s raised by the rugby fraternity, many of whom – with some very honourable exceptions – were more than happy to play ball with South Africa in the apartheid years.

You know, the time when sport and politics couldn’t and shouldn’t mix? Cripes, when was their colour-blindness cured?

Anyway, de Villiers’ charges were laid low by our boys, leading Tom to declare “the fires of Irish rugby are burning brighter than they have ever burned in all the long history of Irish rugby”.

“We’re rugby’s master race, we’ll mash any one who steps in our way,” Declan Kidney didn’t say.

“The World Cup is two years away, if the man above spares us,” he, instead, declared, with one of those humility-laden shrugs that makes you want to build a statue to the fella in your back garden.

Back in the studio Hook was paying tribute to the Croke Park referee, “He doesn’t have a car in the car park, he has a white stick and a tin can because he is certainly visually challenged”.

He was too, at times, but it might have been the fog that clouded his vision, the pitch resembling a scene on the moors from Wuthering Heights. Jonathan Sexton, our dashing hero, has been called many things in his time, but, rarely, we suspect, Heathcliff. Until Saturday.

“It’s a common enough (and very possibly true) allegation about de Villiers’ appointment, but it’s always amusing when it’s raised by the rugby fraternity, many of whom – with some very honourable exceptions – were more than happy to play ball with South Africa in the apartheid years