TV VIEW:AS WE'VE long since learned, the easiest way to judge just how excited Bill is about the 90 minutes in store on any given night is how far he's leaning back and rotating in his swivelly chair when he welcomes us to his humble Montrose abode.

Last week, for example, there was a divil a swivel as he sat bolt upright while welcoming us to coverage of the first leg of the Champions League semi-final between Bayern Munich and Lyon, a game that proved to be to insomnia what penicillin was to bacteria. A cure.

Indeed, Bayern’s ascent to Champions League finalists status reminded us of that most cruel of terrace chants: “If Emile Heskey can play for England so can I.”

Last night, though, while he wasn’t quite horizontal, if he’d tilted back another foot all we’d have seen were the soles of his shoes, an inch more and he’d have been like a synchronised swimmer doing one of her upside-downy-in-the-water moves, only his feet would have been visible above the desk.

But when Bill is this electrified it usually signals, to be honest, that the evening will be a dispiriting damp squib, because frankly nothing could ever meet his towering expectations.

That, though, is why Gilesie and Dunphy are so important in Bill’s life, they bring him down, rarely gently, to the point where he’s close to crestfallen come kick-off.

As the Malahide poet Ronan Keating once put it, “Life is a rollercoaster, just gotta ride it,” and Bill, to his credit, has learnt to ride this journey of pre-match emotions without letting it get him down.

“I have to say John, I am hugely excited – and I LOVE the clichés,” he declared, his head once again perilously gravitating towards the floor behind him. “The forces of darkness against the age of enlightenment!”

“That’s rubbish,” said Dunphy.

And we were off.

(By then, incidentally, the caption people in RTÉ had been mischievous enough to point out that Dunphy had as little latter-stages-of-European-Cup experience as the rest of us . . .

Giles: “European Cup runner-up with Leeds, 1975.”

Whelan: “European Cup winner with Liverpool, 1984.”

Dunphy: “23 caps for Ireland.”

. . . uncalled-for, frankly).

Anyway, undaunted, Bill whipped out his statistics to remind the resident curmudgeons that Barcelona’s defence wasn’t half as rubbish as they claimed.

“You have to stop this nonsense,” said Dunphy to Bill, “there are a whole lot of statisticians floating around football now feeding people a load of lies.”

Bill could have taken this barb personally, but he rose above it, persisting in lyrically waxing about all things Barcelona, the love of his footballing life.

“Someone compared them to the Harlem Globe Trotters,” said Dunphy, nigh on spittin’ out the words.

Gilesie was more concerned about Barca’s inability to do the ugly things well, like defending. “Bill, it’s like Russian roulette with them, it’s offside or nothing.” Bill didn’t care. Nothing would quench the flame. If anything, the fact that Barca couldn’t (allegedly) defend made him love them even more.

Making no apologies for his Catalonian pride or prejudice, Bill settled back for the game, handing over to the Nou Camp. Except George Hamilton was worryingly silent. Finally, his voice reached us. “An over zealous person in the press box pulled the plug on us,” he explained, as the over zealous person in the press box was taken away on eight stretchers.

A quiet enough first half, apart from Thiago Motta being sent off for viciously elbowing/tapping the chin of Sergio Busquets. Game on, surely. But the time drifted on, as it has a habit of doing, and Bill, no more than ourselves, could sense that the age of enlightenment wouldn’t score in a month of Wednesdays against the forces of darkness. Except they did. Pique. Good lad.

Not enough, though. Bill and Ronnie Whelan suddenly realised Barca for all their loveliness, were mere mortals. Gilesie and Dunphy tried really hard to resist throwing a ‘told you so’ in Bill’s direction, but they didn’t resist hard enough.

“A typical Italian defensive display,” shrugged Ronnie, of the Italian defence that, to be fair, contained no Italians. Bill didn’t care. He wore the look of a man who’d had a worse day than even Gordon Brown. Cameron v Clegg, Inter v Bayern. Nothing to swivel about.