From tobogganing in Thurles to Wee Willie's Limerick streak

TV VIEW:A MOST peculiar sporting week that, and confirmation of its quirkiness was the sight of almost as much snow in Thurles for Saturday night's National League hurling game between Tipperary and Kilkenny as there has been in Vancouver for the Winter Olympics.

“I’m heading off now to the car park to get my luge,” said Setanta’s Daire O’Brien as he bid us adieu once the match had been postponed, leaving Seánie McGrath and Dáithí Regan standing in a blizzard on the Semple Stadium pitch wondering how on earth they were supposed to make it home.

“Get out there, ye hardy men, it’s only a bit of snow,” Daire had declared when the match was, at first, delayed, “although, in fairness,” he conceded, “how would you distinguish the sliotar from a snowflake?”

And that was the problem, insisted Dáithí, “when the goalkeeper pucks it out 70 yards down the park you won’t know what’s coming down on you – you could be catching snowballs”.

We kind of liked that idea, to be honest: snowball-fielding could even be added to the programme for the 2014 Winter Games in Russia, with Henry Shefflin, say, taking on Shunsuke Suzuki in the gold medal decider. It’d be a cat-and-mouse contest, so to speak, but Henry would effortlessly pluck the bulk of the snowballs out of the sky and bring gold home to Ireland. And considering how valuable the most precious of metals is this weather, we need all the gold we can muster.

No hurling, then, left us having to settle for the action in Vancouver. Mind you, after witnessing Marion Rolland’s mishap we weren’t too sure if we wanted to watch any more. Four years the French downhill skier had prepared for this, and six seconds after tumbling out the gates she fell over.

That’s the only reason we watch rather than compete: why risk all that disappointment? If you never even attempt to achieve then you won’t be gutted when you don’t, if you know what we mean.

Meanwhile. “What was it like?”

“It was like being shot out of a really long gun barrel and electrocuted at the same time, my whole body is fizzing, it’s like someone pulled my brain out and filled my head up with champagne.”

Tiger after his news conference?

Seánie after finding a spare toboggan in the Semple Stadium car park?

No, Ed Leigh, the BBC Winter Olympics commentator, after trying out a skeleton run.

Fair play to Ed for being brave enough to give it a go, but we really wish he hadn’t brought us with him.

And by hooking that camera to his helmet he did just that. If you watched it, well, by the end of the run your stomach would have been lodged between your toes, and the wailing, gurgling sounds Ed made all the way down hardly helped. Not to be too crude about it, he actually sounding like he was vomiting in his helmet through the whole experience, which left us . . . no, don’t want to talk about it.

That’s why we switched to the curling with our red button. “Just in case you only watch curling once very four years, these are the basics,” said Hazel Irvine, leaving us a bit offended, like we’re just bandwagon curlers.

In protest, after watching a couple of rounds/ends/halves/ quarters/frames/sets/sweeps between Britain and Germany, we left.

Golf. We’ve been no less aggrieved by the suggestion that shiftless sporty telly watchers have zilch interest in golf when Tiger’s not involved – as if we’d be that fair-weatherishly fickle and so pathetically star-struck.

Take that Matchplay Championship thingie in Arizona. Eh, who won?

Of course, Tiger was accused by mean-spirited cynics of timing his global address on Friday to clash with that Matchplay thingie because it was sponsored by a company that ditched him once they became aware of his voracious appetite for birdies. A bit like, say, Willie O’Dea timing a naked run up Limerick’s O’Connell Street to clash with John Gormley’s address to the next Green Party convention.

Well, pity the cynics, that’s all we can say. And pity those who disagreed with the Dunphy man last week when he declared Wayne Rooney to be “the greatest player I’ve seen since Pele”. Some alleged this bordered on hyperbole, when, in fact, it was an understatement. A good understatement, not a great one.

Pele, we recently concluded, isn’t fit to polish young Wayne’s boots.

But then he had a complete ’mare against Everton, proving, much to our stupefaction, that the lad borders on the almost-human.

Dion Dublin, in the Sky Sports studio, was a bit gobsmacked himself, although, referring to the moment Rooney almost equalised from a free-kick when United were 2-1 down, he said: “That would have been a goal if it had gone in.”

Do you know? He was spot on.