A load of Shi'ite as Donegal Taliban have Spillane heading for the hills

TV VIEW:SUCH WAS the RTÉ panel's mood come full-time yesterday there really wasn't any danger of them giving us a lusty rendition of Mary from Dungloe, not least because it kicks off with "Oh then fare thee well, sweet Donegal". Quickly followed by "it breaks my heart from you to part".

In fairness, they had feared the worst before we even got up and running, Pat Spillane persisting with one of the summer’s more peculiar sporting analogies: “Donegal have the Taliban of GAA defences.”

“Why the Taliban?” asked Joe Brolly.

“It’s just an extreme defensive system that has proved effective to date,” Pat explained.

Joe looked at Michael Lyster. Michael Lyster looked at Joe. They really were none the wiser. But Pat had a point in that the Taliban have been hard to see off, a bit like Jim McGuinness’s charges this year. “Remorseless, fanatical underdogs,” as Joe described them. Donegal that is, not the Taliban.

Joe had been up Letterkenny way during the week and brought back word that Donegal would be “even more defensive than usual”, which prompted Pat to lose the will to live and Colm O’Rourke to ask if they actually planned on parking their team bus on the pitch.

“And you know,” said Joe, “if this is the way we’re heading, we’ll end up with results like 0-2 to 0-1.” Silly.

Twenty-four minutes gone: 0-1 to 0-1.

Who, you wondered, would nick the winning point? There was, though, a veritable avalanche of points before the break, Donegal going in 0-4 to 0-2 up, but that didn’t seem to satisfy the panel, Pat telling us that he didn’t know whether “to laugh or cry”.

“Heaven help us if this is the way the game of Gaelic football is going to go because I’ve seen the apocalypse there in the last 38 minutes.” Michael maintained the theme by recalling a line from Apocalypse Now to describe the game – “the horror, the horror” – but Pat left him in Vietnam and moved west to Iraq.

“Remember that tribe in Iraq, the Shi’ite tribe? Well, we’ve been watching Shi’ite football. You know, there are people who go to the Hague for war crimes – I tell you this, some of the coaches nowadays should be up for crimes against Gaelic football.”

At this juncture you had to feel for, say, a visitor to Ireland tuning in to RTÉ in their hotel room, just to get a flavour of the local culture. “The Taliban? Vietnam? Iraq? The Shi’ites? The International Criminal Court? Crimes against humanity? Jeez, Donegal sound, like, totally evil.”

By full-time Pat had moved further west in his geographical search for yet more Donegal analogies: “A Turkey of a game,” he declared.

Joe agreed, reckoning Tir Conaill’s Taliban “stank the place out”, but he confessed to finding the contest oddly “fascinating”. “What,” asked Michael, “like seeing a plane crash?” Colm nodded. “This was the game from hell,” he said, “Donegal reduced it to a shambles, in a cynical sort of way. They got what they deserved, which was nothing.”

You’d hazard a guess the lads won’t receive a warm welcome next time they’re amble in to the Rosses and Gweedore, although by the sounds of Pat, if he has to watch Donegal again any time soon, he’d opt to croon: “Farewell to kind relations for I’m bound for Amerikay”.

It was on the whole, then, a gloomy sort of a sporting weekend on RTÉ, the post-mortem on that rugby setback on Saturday no more cheerful.

But look, once Brian O’Driscoll returns everything will be . . . wait: “We believe that somehow when he comes back he’s going to come down like an apparition at Knock and beat teams on his own . . . he’s not,” said George Hook, denting our faith.

Things could be worse. You could be Arsenal. As Gary Neville put it on Sky yesterday after, well, ‘Manchester United Eight Arsenal Alive’, “the most positive thing for them today is that they’ve not got a game for two weeks”.

You knew what the fella meant, but still. It brings to mind the line from Nottingham Forest’s Luke Chambers a few years back when he was asked: “It’s almost seven months since Forest were last beaten, what do you put that down to?” His reply: “The fact that we didn’t play for three months during the summer was a massive help.”

Lots of sad faces, then, over the weekend, but not, you’d imagine, at Setanta HQ. They were surely still slugging champagne after their decision to show Shamrock Rovers’ Europa League game against Partizan Belgrade live on Thursday night. Even though there was no chance in hell of Rovers progressing.

“Rovers corner. Ball in. Comfortably dealt with. The shot coMES IN! OoooOOOooh! WHAAAAAT a screamer! Man ALIVE! Out of nowhere!” And that was only Nigel Bidmead describing Rovers’ first goal, Pat Sullivan’s jaw-dropping volley.

Rovers’ winner? He’d barely got his breath back to describe it.