From Davy ‘Fitz’ and the way he might roar at you to a little bit of squirming

Only 12 days in, it's a bit early yet to be breaking those new year's resolutions about becoming finely tuned athletes by early summer, so what better way to kick-start it all than by finely tuning in to Ireland's Fittest Family from the couch?

And you'd have been exhausted by the end of the opening episode of the RTÉ series, and exhaustion is, apparently, all part of the fitness-seeking process, not least after watching the bit where the contestants had to kayak across Dublin bay. Darragh Maloney suggested our Olympian Eoin Rheinisch would have been impressed by their efforts, particularly because they were in danger of being mowed down by the Holyhead ferry. And they were too.

Four mentors
The four mentors selected to inspire the 12 families to victory are Kenneth 'Kenny' Egan, Eddie 'rugby person' O'Sullivan, Nikki 'reverse strike' Symmons (who has won more hockey caps for Ireland than most of us have had triple choc brownies) and the legend that is Davy 'Fitz' Fitzgerald.

The location for episode one? Dublin Port. Not to be disrespectful at all to the place, but it wasn't pretty, all the time you half expected Bunk from The Wire to emerge from behind a container to arrest the contestants on suspicion of importing contraband from a far flung place. Which would have put the kibosh on the whole thing.

All four mentors were, naturally, tough task masters, but Davy, possibly not surprisingly, appeared the toughest of them all, the moment a man, who wasn’t exactly lofty, kept sliding down the side of container he was tasked with climbing and summiting most revealing of all.

“STAAAAAAAAY FOCUSSSSSSSSSSSSED,” Davy howled at him, in a manner so menacing the man in question promptly climbed it like Spiderman. And that was when you truly knew how Clare won the All-Ireland last year.

As Rocky’s trainer put it: “You’re gonna eat lightnin’ and you’re gonna crap thunder!”

Which is a seamless link to Saturday's Football Focus.

Sylvester Stallone and Robert De Niro doing the Premier League predictions.

No, really.
De Niro seemed as enthused about the task as he does about most media interactions, but the Sly man was well up for it, his boldest forecast a 17-0 triumph for Everton over Norwich, which prompted some to rush to their Fantasy Football selections to make Romelu Lukaku captain.

One assist, no goals? The Eye Of The Toothless Tiger.

A touch uncomfortable
More entertaining still on Football Focus was the sight of Robbie Fowler and Robbie Savage looking a touch uncomfortable after a Gary Lineker interview with Thomas Hitzlsperger who, of course, came out as gay last week.

Fowler and Savage, rather famously, were two of the highest profile homophobic tosspots in their day, Graeme Le Saux's account of his treatment at their hands, particularly Fowler's, mind-blowing in its spite. And Le Saux, you might recall, was deemed gay largely because, well, he read the Guardian.

“Get up, you poof,” Fowler said to Le Saux in a game at Stamford Bridge in 1999 after he’d decked him. And then he bent over, pointed at his rear-end, smirked and, three or four times, as Le Saux recalled, said: “Come and give me one up the a***.” All of which helped up the decibels of hate directed towards Le Saux from the terraces.

The two Robbies reckoned this was all just a bit of ‘banter’ at the time, Le Saux suggesting its impact was a little more profound, “I felt a great surge of relief when I retired”, he said, no longer having to deal with their brainless bigotry.

"It was embarrassing," conceded Fowler when challenged on Football Focus about his behaviour, confident that those days are gone and that it would be safer now for a high profile player to 'come out'.

Maybe, but only because turds like him are yesterday’s footballing men.