Summer's here, but where are the farmers of yesteryear?

TV View: Grey skies, a steady drizzle, a nip in the air - so, summer's approaching at last and it's time to while away our Sabbath afternoons in the company of RTÉ's Sunday Game Livepanel, writes Mary Hannigan.

Colm O'Rourke alleged that Joe Brolly hadn't wintered well, the grey hairs, he suggested, had multiplied, but the Meath man was a picture of well-being, boasting a tan of a caramel hue, unless the make-up department had lost the run of itself and/or the tube in our telly is playing up again.

Hope should, of course, spring eternal at this time of year. As Martin Luther King once nearly said: "If you lose hope, somehow you lose the vitality that keeps life moving and the belief that you get your hands on Sam this year."

"You don't like to put a dampener on the whole thing on the first day, because every team sallies forth with great hope in their breasts," said Joe, before putting a dampener on the whole thing by ruling out the Sam-winning prospects of roughly 28 counties.

Such was the impact of Kerry's Kieran Donaghy last season that the question up for debate, at the start of yesterday's programme, was whether the other counties should stick a Big Lad up front and lump high balls in to him all afternoon.

Donegal's Brendan Devenney respectfully pointed out that there was more to Donaghy than altitude, while Laois manager Liam Kearns noted that "Donaghys don't grow on trees".

The consensus, though, seemed to be that if you could unearth a useful Big Lad then you'd boost your hopes of sallying forth through the championship.

A Big Lad like, say, Warrington Wolves' six-foot-two Kiwi prop Paul Rauhihi, who weighs in at just under 19st. As Sky Sports' commentator Mike "Stevo" Stephenson put it so splendidly recently, "If I caught him in bed with my wife, I'd probably tuck him in".

Rauhihi, though, was unavailable for championship action yesterday, and also absent was, as Colm ruefully observed, an agricultural element to the line-ups of Longford, Westmeath, Cavan and Down.

"I was just looking through the occupations of the teams and it's all students, students, students, a building contractor, (Joe: "A flower arranger"), IT consultant, this type of thing - the one noticeable thing is there isn't a farmer in either team.

"Who doses the bullocks in the country any more? The poor auld farmers. Every good team needs a couple of farmers."

As it proved, though, in the first of RTÉ's live games, Longford's Brian Kavanagh ploughed his way like a dosed bull through the Westmeath defence, chipping in with 2-6 in a comeback of startling proportions.

No shortage of excitement there then, which was more than Joe and Colm could bring themselves to say about the Cavan v Down game. Not that they were expecting much.

"Down's plan last year was to kick the ball to Benny Coulter, and if that didn't work to kick it even more to Benny Coulter," said Colm, hinting that Down needed to invest in a Plan B.

Joe was no more hopeful about Cavan's prospects, recalling that they looked like "ducks in thunder" when they played Antrim.

Half-time. While Colm concluded that a sizeable proportion of the players on view just weren't fit, Joe was more generous: he reckoned they were just "incompetent".

"Several of the players out there today aren't even the cousin of a county footballer," he said.

"Ah, that's not fair," said Michael Lyster.

"Well, what's the point sitting here and saying 'isn't he a lovely lad, his parents are very decent people'," asked Joe.

We're up and running. It will, we reckon, be a long summer.

But no longer than the one newly-relegated Sheffield United are about to suffer.

"What's your reaction to Manchester United going in (to the game against West Ham) without the likes of Scholes, Ronaldo, Giggs, Vidic and Ferdinand," Sky's Richard Keys asked Neil Warnock before the games kicked off.

"I'm quite pleased Ferdinand's not playing," the Sheffield United manager grinned, his hopes of the United defence keeping a clean sheet boosted.

But they conceded a goal, and scored none, so West Ham, fourth from bottom at the start of the day, beat the newly crowned Premiership champions at Old Trafford; it was only United's second home league defeat all season, the last in September to Arsenal.

So Sheffield United went down.

"It's a great reflection on the English game and the Premiership," said Sky co-commentator Alan Smith of the day's proceedings, a comment that clinched the "greatest bit of guff you've heard all season" award.

If the Premiership were as honest as they keep telling us (note Liverpool line-up v Fulham, United's line-up v West Ham), Warnock would still be recovering from a champagne-induced hangover as we speak.

"But by Tuesday it'll be fish and chip paper and nobody will give two hoots," he said to Sky.

True enough.