TV View: Misery abounds for Ireland, Arsenal and Tyrone

It’s as well New Zealand provided us with that jubilantly joyous performance of the Haka after their pulsating World Cup final triumph over England because apart from that, the weekend would have been off the scale on the misery meter, just a wearying Groundhog Day series of ‘where did it all go wrong?’ post-mortems on poorly performing teams.

“Absolutely disastrous,” Arsene Wenger conceded of his charges’ display at Anfield when he spoke to Sky, but it could just as easily have been Tom Tierney or Mickey Harte talking about the performances produced by their particular teams.

Tierney, of course, announced his resignation from his post when he talked with RTÉ's Evanne Ní Chuilinn after the exceedingly awful defeat to Wales, but RTÉ are still off Harte's chatting list, so they filled the gap by concluding their coverage of Tyrone's obliteration by Dublin with Bonnie croaking Total Eclipse of the ..., well, Harte. Ouch.

Plenty of gloom, then, and no little doom, the World Cup proving to be a bit of a heart-breaker too.

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The only home-grown performances to savour come the end of it were produced by the pundits, Fiona Steed, Lynne Cantwell and Fiona Coghlan refreshingly honest throughout, as was Eddie O’Sullivan over on eir Sport. Even though, for the former internationals especially, it wasn’t easy.

"I found it quite hard to be critical of people we know and love, but it was necessary," said Steed, who, like all the others, was asked for her reaction to Ruth O'Reilly's revelations about life in the Irish squad in this paper on Saturday.

None was surprised, they’d heard their own whispers. Although learning that the players were asked to come up with their own ‘playbooks’, ‘dossiers’ and ‘training plans’ for the World Cup games ahead left jaws sitting on studio floors.

They all, largely, regretted the timing of O’Reilly speaking out, but agreed her revelations meant that the running of women’s rugby in Ireland needed a major kick in the arse.

Steed, though, refused to absolve the players of blame either, which was welcome too. She, Cantwell, Coghlan and Co set high standards for themselves and their team-mates in their playing days, helping take the women’s game from a point when few of us even knew there was a national team to winning a Grand Slam and inflicting on New Zealand a defeat at the 2014 World Cup that was their first in the competition since 1991.

She wasn’t, then, going to gloss over the players’ part in a desperately poor tournament.

“The performances have reflected poor coaching, but once the players crossed the whitewash they didn’t do their basic skillset well either – and they’re experienced international players,” she said.

O’Sullivan echoed that point, blame needed to be apportioned in every direction. The defeat by Australia, he said, was “a pretty comprehensive battering of women’s rugby in Ireland”, the whole thing had “spiralled out of control in the end”.

Back to the drawing board. Again.

A tearful Cantwell felt for the players, not least her former comrade Maz Reilly who, evidently inconsolable, told RTÉ “that’s it for me”.

“It’s disappointing, but I’ll get over it,” said Tierney. You suspect the likes of Reilly never will.

More tears when Sean Cavanagh embraced his family after his final appearance for Tyrone. The respect shown to him by the Dubs was a mark of them as men, and a mark of a majestic career that earned that level of esteem.

“This is Ali/Frazier, that type of thing,” Colm O’Rourke had said before the game. By half-time he reckoned it was more like “Ali/Cooper”. No contest.

“They were buzzing around like blue-arsed flies in the sunroom,” said Joe Brolly of his Ulster cousins, Pat Spillane noting, with some despair, their “Caveman tactics”. It’s probably as well Mickey didn’t show for a post-match chat.

Once again, then, it's the Dubs v Mayo. "It's like The Mousetrap", Colm said of Mayo's quest to collect Sam. That opened with Blue Murder. Judging by the Dubs on Sunday, you'd worry for Mayo that it'll be Groundhog Day.