The feeling of a long hot summer ahead as Joe goes on the attack

TV VIEW:IT WAS bucketing down in Monaco while the sun was splitting the goalposts in Thurles, and it's not often you can say that. And for some reason best known to themselves the BBC gave Eddie Jordan umbrella-carrying duties as he and his colleagues wandered around after the Grand Prix, his arm stretched to snapping point as he tried to shield six foot, four inch Jake Humphrey and David Coulthard's figure-hugging white pants from the deluge.

No such weather woes back in Tipperary, apart from extreme heat.

Mad stuff. “It’s melting hot,” said Ger Loughnane at half-time in the Tipp v Limerick game, the Clare man making a very welcome return to our screens after suffering from ill health.

Speaking of umbrellas. Earlier, Joe Brolly had saluted Ger too, in a ‘heil’ kind of way, referring to him and “what-do-you-call-him” (that would have been Cyril Farrell) as “hurling Nazis”. Michael went a slightly whiter shade of pale; ‘Jesus, you didn’t seriously say that?’, said Colm O’Rourke’s face.

Joe’s point, though, was that the first half of Kerry v Tipp was so utterly lamentable, it gave further ammunition to the ‘hurling, hurling, uber alles’ brigade, among them, he alleged, Ger and Cyril.

“They’re sitting out there chatting, they’re not even watching the match,” he said.

Colm was no more impressed by what he’d witnessed, divil a sign of kicking, “there must have been a thousand hand passes”.

Joe insisted that GAA president Liam O’Neill was spot on first time around when he was quoted as saying Gaelic football had become boring, bemoaning his clarification of the comments that suggested they had been misinterpreted.

Serial hand-passing, solo running and blanket defending, Joe said, were “infectious diseases” that are “at the root of why the game is increasingly becoming unwatchable”. He added: “That’s complete rubbish we’re watching today,” he said.

“Thanks for that impassioned promotion of our coverage of Gaelic football, keep it up and our audience will turn over, en masse, to a repeat of Come Dine With Me on TV3, even though it’ll be seared scallops with black pudding and a hint of ginger for the 865th show in succession,” Michael very nearly replied.

It’s at times like this that he must pine for a GAA version of Jamie Redknapp – eg: “Yeah, true, you might wonder why it’s called ‘foot’-ball, and there was a lot of soloing up blind alleys, and when Kieran Donaghy came on he did more tracking back than actual attacking, which would be a bit like playing Lionel Messi at full-back, and, generally, yeah, the tactics were a little negative, but it’s still the best Gaelic football product on, like, the whole of planet earth, innit?”

But no, Michael’s stuck with Joe and Colm. “Me and my father sit at the Derry matches now and we call it our weekly punishment,” said Joe, piling it on about the unwatchability of the current game.

Mind you, before kick-off he briefly swooned about Kerry – “they play such beeeeeeautiful football” – and said they were so relaxed ahead of their meeting with Tipp because “it’s a bit like Manchester City against Plymouth or Stevenage, someone like that - this will be a loosener for them today”.

Well, Plymouth or Stevenage put up a half decent battle, Kerry City winning by just the six points in the end. Joe was effusive in his praise, in no sense at all. He turned his Sturmgewehr on Jack O’Connor, suggesting he wasn’t doing a terribly good job with the talent at his disposal.

“But he led them to an All-Ireland title a couple of years ago,” argued Michael.

“Did they not lead him to an All-Ireland,” Joe replied, alleging that the only All-Ireland titles they’d won under him were “cakewalks” against Mayo and Cork.

“Every time they’ve been tested they’ve lost,” he said, and, by now, you got the feeling it’ll be a long hot summer.

Mind you, you’d pay an admission fee to witness Joe and Jack bumping in to each other in the bowels of a stadium in the weeks ahead.

Speaking of sunniness. Was it just a dodgy tube in our telly, or did Daire O’Brien, Conor O’Shea, Brent Pope and Shane Horgan look like Red Hot Chili Peppers come the end of Leinster’s setback against the Ospreys at the RDS yesterday?

The lads really could have done with Eddie Jordan turning up armed with a parasol.

“Once again, the double proves a step too far for Leinster,” said Daire, “this time by the width of a gnat’s undercarriage.”

Dan Biggar has been called many things in his time, but probably not that.

He won’t mind, though, after yesterday’s triumph it was sunny side up.