Ruud can't pick up Keys as Sky's Madrid effort less than sufficient

TV VIEW:Mary Hannigan takes a look at television's take on the sporting weekend.

“You had a happy record here with AC Milan?”

“What?”

“Your record here with Milan – it was very good?”

“I can hear nothing!”

“YOU DID VERY WELL HERE WITH MILAN.”

“Meelan?”

“YES!”

“What?”

“Milan?”

“MEELAN?”

“Yes!”

“I can hear nothing!”

There’s a lot to be said for RTÉ covering the Champions League from the safety and tranquillity of Montrose. It’s all fine and dandy having a chunky budget, but when you go to the expense of shipping your presenter and panel to Madrid and placing them on the Bernabeu pitch you, in a perfect world, want them to be able to hear each other when they’re previewing the biggest game in the history of biggest games.

Instead, the Sky Sports crew fought a losing battle with the din created by 80,100 feverish fans, all highly entertaining, in an unscheduled kind of way.

We sensed, though, that Richard Keys was failing to see the funny side of Ruud Gullit’s inability to hear a single word he was saying (apart from “Meelan”), so much so we anticipated him turning around and howling “SSSSH” at 80,100 folk. It would have been a hoot, too, if they’d all fallen silent.

Graeme Souness, meanwhile, evidently feared being drowned by the stadium’s pitch-watering sprinklers, treating us to a little hop and skip and jump as he tried to avoid the spray. “RELAX,” said Richard, who really needed to heed his own advice.

After the break the panel was, mercifully, back in the studio, Richard conceding they had been “beaten back by the heat, noise and water”.

Those elements, though, failed to dampen the spirits of the supporters, not least the Bayern contingent, he noted.

“Plenty of beer, sausage and efficiency from these Germans in Madrid today,” he told us. Him being on a roll, we half expected him to ask Jamie Redknapp if he thought the Bayern aerial threat would be Luftwaffe-like – to be honest we’d have paid to hear the reply – but even Richard knew where to draw the line. In the sand.

Any way, by the end of the build-up on all the channels you’d half think it was Jose Mourinho v Bayern. Which, in many ways, it was. Come full-time Jose had seen off Bayern, and while Ruud wasn’t overwhelmed by the spectacle he was moved to half-praise the winning team. “Sufficient,” he called them. “Efficient,” Souness corrected him. “Yes, sorry, efficient.” Jose, then, had turned Inter in to Germans.

“Is he a genius or is he lucky?” asked Ronnie Whelan back on RTÉ and, for one night only, Johnny Giles echoed the thoughts of Jamie back on Sky: “Genius.”

Even Jamie, though, suggested Richard had mislaid the plot when he declared that Nostradamus Mourinho had known he was going to win the Champions League “from the moment a ball was kicked in the competition this season”.

“He is good, but I’m not sure he’s quite that good Richard,” he said.

The final was “a little bit like a McDonald’s meal, enjoyable at the time but it’s not going to leaveany long-lasting impression”.

Which, funnily enough, was precisely how Pat Spillane summed up the first half between Meath and Offaly yesterday.

As we know by now, Joe Brolly regards Pat as an analyst who is one fry short of a Happy Meal, and their love-in continuing unabated yesterday when Joe noted Pat’s forecast for Tyrone and Antrim contradicted the thoughts expressed in his newspaper column (“whoever writes it”). Pat pointed out that the Sunday papers were jammed with stories about Ronan Keating’s private life, prompting him to turn to Joe, in a no way rehearsed moment, and say: “You say it best when you say nothing at all.”

Life, then, in the Sunday Game studio continues to be a bit of a rollercoaster, the sole issue uniting the panel being “Handpass-gate” which, they reckon, is largely responsible for pernickety refereeing.

“We seem to have a whole squadron of traffic wardens refereeing the game now,” sighed Joe. A bit like the Gilesie/Jamie detente, Pat agreed. “If I want to hear good whistling I’ll go to see Paddy Moloney and Seán Potts.”

After the game Meath manager Eamon O’Brien turned up on the screen to express his solidarity with the panel over their dislike of the handpass rule change.

“I always say if I was using a typewriter or a word processor or a computer and they changed where the letter A was it’d take me a long time to get used to it,” he said. It was, we thought, a sound analogy.

But Eamon didn’t let the whole business worry him, he was a contented man – after all, Mezth had seen off Offzly, 1-20 to 2-7.