Grab a spot on the couch and relax, the telly footie is back

TV VIEW:A WORLD Cup-less summer, without even the solace of a European Championship, is, of course, a wasteland in time, a void that not even, say, Real MadridTV could fill with live coverage of their new signings' medicals. Marathon coverage it was too, incidentally. Every time the club doctors thought they were done and had packed away their scalpels, another €50 million purchase walked in the door accompanied by a TV crew and an image rights' lawyer.

Desperate times, then. You can even end up trying to watch Hull City v Beijing Guoan in the Asia Cup on the internet when you find yourself in a television-football- free zone, your scundering of the teams’ lack of movement ending only with the realisation your broadband died 20 minutes before.

We were sorry, though, to have missed the game on telly because, by all accounts, former Newcastle defender Warren Barton had a blinder in his pundit’s chair.

“Beijing, an amazing city,” he declared, “it hosted the Olympics and that put it on the map.”

It reminded us a bit of the time Jimmy Greaves gazed upon the Colosseum during Italia ’90 and took it that it was a building damaged by rioting England fans. Jimmy was kidding. We think.

Warren was quite probably tuned in to the BBC on Saturday evening to watch his former club help open the channel’s coverage of The Championship season. Gary Lineker, his chocolaty tan confirming he didn’t spend much time in Ireland this summer, tried to convince us that West Brom and Newcastle are two former giants of the game, but as their fans will attest their glory days coincided, roughly, with Beijing’s foundation stones being laid.

It’s been a while, then, since the good times, and if bits of Saturday’s game are anything to go by it could be half a million years before they arrive again.

Star of the show for Newcastle, positioned precariously behind their “defence”, was substitute goalkeeper Tim Krul who, Gary noted, looked like “a stretched out version of Tomas Brolin”. And stretched out is how he’ll find himself for much of the season unless the club does some intensive shopping.

“The squad was very thin when I arrived last season – and they’ve since sold seven or eight players and haven’t replaced them,” said Alan Shearer.

“And you still want to manage them,” asked Gary.

“Yes,” said Alan.

Lee Dixon giggled. Alan didn’t. Managing Newcastle is no laughing matter.

When Jose Mourinho said recently, in a rare outburst of modesty, “I cannot make miracles, I am not Harry Potter,” we took it he was ruling himself out of the Newcastle running.

Harry Potter, of course, is unavailable for the job, he’s busy overseeing the Kilkenny hurlers performing miracles. Not that Brian Cody thinks there’s anything miraculous about his work with the county: how else would you spend your summer other than marching relentlessly towards a four-in-a-row?

“They are beatable, so they are,” insisted Davy Fitzgerald after yesterday’s game, when, as Cyril Farrell put it, Fitzgerald’s Waterford “hurled with their hearts”.

Ger Loughnane seemed less convinced, and suspected there was a Dolly the Sheep-type production line in a lab in deepest Kilkenny churning out players of ridiculously exceptional quality.

“They’re all clones of each other,” he said, noting that, like some of his senior fellow county men, Walter Walsh did everything wrong but got everything right.

“Unorthodox,” agreed Tomás Mulcahy, concluding that the coaching manual was something Kilkenny hurlers used to light their fires on autumny evenings.

Meanwhile, over at Wembley it was The Big One: The Community Shield.

Alex Ferguson fielded a team with no new faces, with that €94 million cheque from Real Madrid obviously still in the post, while Chelsea showed off their new manager, Carlo Ancelotti, a man who confessed to being smitten by Yorkshire pudding since he arrived in England. The Italians do have impeccable taste.

Chelsea, having persuaded John Terry not to take one, triumphed on penalties, which, if God is good, will be their last trophy of the season.

What did we learn from yesterday’s game? Plenty. Didier Drogba’s pony-tail is wrong, very wrong, and that black squiggle on United’s new jersey makes them look like Hull Kingston Rovers.

The game itself was fine, while falling some way short of “orgasmic football”, as Spillane described Kerry’s display in their narrow, 17-point defeat of Dublin.

The important thing is that our telly football is back, it’s time to come out of the monsoons and settle down for an uninterrupted 10 months of club football, followed by the World Cup. Now we’re whistling.