Bill sets up inviting string of sitters after several solo runs

TV VIEW:WITH SO much talk of "dead rubbers" and "anti-climax" last night's international really should have been a pun paradise. But what's the point? Even in Croke Park, it must have been difficult to raise any enthusiasm. Those of us fated to watch at home could only feel the icy-cold teaspoon of tedium.

There was a sense of dislocation right from the start.

“Can our boys secure a place in sunny South Africa?” breathed the continuity announcer beforehand, clearly still relying on copy from last week when our play-off place was still in doubt. So with next month’s play-off place secure, we were invited to worry about less concrete matters.

“We must beware of the yellow peril,” Tony O’Donoghue squinted, as if perched behind an ack-ack gun on Midway Island.

But instead of Zeroes buzzing Jones’s Road, it was the matter of yellow cards and how Shay Given in particular had to avoid one to play next month that was exercising Tony’s mind.

It was hardly an agenda to have anyone widdling with excitement. With such unpromising material, even the panel looked like they’d rather be watching Hollyoaks.

“This is a dead rubber,” proclaimed Bill, dolefully, inviting Gilesy to go on a solo.

“It’s a very important match to the players coming in,” said the sage gamely. “It’s no dead rubber as far as they are concerned.”

He wasn’t fooling anyone. Even Bill was moved to quickly change the focus to a more exciting topic, venturing that, of the four worthies in studio, only Graeme Souness had played at a World Cup finals. The subject of fringe players got mentioned to at least paint a light coat of relevance to the topic.

“I was fortunate to play at three World Cups. Just to be part of it was fantastic,” Souey said dutifully, before he went on a solo of his own. “As for fringe players, I don’t know. I wasn’t one of them.”

In his Anfield pomp, Souness was famously described as being so self-satisfied that if he were made of chocolate, he’d have eaten himself. And yet he can get away with stuff like that, partly because he was such a wonderful player, but mainly because he still looks capable of “doing” anyone looking even sideways at him.

So yet again we were reliant on Eamo to generate a little heat. After his piece-de-resistance at the weekend, however, Stephen Hunt’s favourite rodent was in the sort of low-key form that chimed perfectly with the night. Bill even set him up with a sitter.

“Your old pal, Eamon,” he grinned. “He did well on Saturday.”

“He did very well when he came on. He’s always very lively and in your face,” Eamo replied with a slight chuckle which poured cold water on those aching for a pyrotechnic Tom Jerry slug-fest. Eamo was admirably generous towards Hunt at half time. “He’s been busy, the one guy who has laid down a marker,” he opined. That spirit continued after the 90 minutes of drudgery on the pitch.

Tony O’Donoghue quizzed man-of-the-match Hunt about the fall out from his criticism of Eamo. He played it down in a big way, as did Dunphy.

“What’s he done?” Eamo declared with commendable zen-like calm. “He’s a kid. He’s done nothing wrong. Everyone’s entitled to their opinion.”

In fact compared to the weekend, Eamo looked to have taken a pretty powerful chill pill.

“We’re not attacking him (Trap.) People have discussions and have different perceptions and judgments. That’s the beauty of sport. It distracts us from what we might be thinking,” he purred.

But Drumcondra’s very own Cheech is in no way backing down on what he believes to be fundamentally wrong with the Trapattoni way of doing things.

After listing off some of Ireland’s elite in other sports, Pádraig Harrington, Sea The Stars et al, he said: “I want our sport to give us that buzz, that pride and to have that kind of ambition.”

And, after his name being notably absent until then, Andy Reid came roaring back into the equation with a fervour that was certainly absent from the pitch.

“Saturday’s performance wasn’t shameful. Andy Reid’s exclusion was. I don’t care what people object to, as long as the people looking at this programme are informed. And the idea that somebody like Andy Reid or Lee Carsley wouldn’t improve that team is a nonsense,” Eamo said defiantly. Now there’s a climax! Roll on November!