Buzzing Bobby and an electric Sky

"Are you buzzing Bob?" "Oooh, em, I'm very buzzing." "Well, if your spine doesn't tingle tonight, it never will." Buzzing Bobby Robson looked puzzled, but then Buzzing Bobby is still getting used to life as a Sky Sports' pundit. And getting used to Richard Keys, whose spine tingles easily, is proving even more of a challenge for the former England manager.

But, in fairness to Richard, there WAS a touch of electricity in the air on Saturday evening, when England played Italy in Rome - a night Sky had marketed as "The Italian Job" and spent the week promoting with someone pretending to be Michael Caine.

By Saturday night they had hired the real Michael Caine, star of "The Italian Job" (clever, eh?), to give us his views on the most important match in English history since the last most important match in English history, last month.

"Gazza to me is the heart of the team, he's right there in the middle," he said is his pre-match interview. "Alright, he has his faults, he's like . . . Marilyn Monroe. She couldn't act very well but she was a star, so you didn't care if she was late, she brought the people in and she won the game," he said.

"Top man, Michael Caine - and he knows what he's talking about too," said Richard. The viewing public, who had heard Gazza being compared to many things in its time (usually to members of the animal kingdom), but never Marilyn Monroe, was less convinced.

Mention of Gazza then led to a studio discussion on just how much he was a changed man, how much he had matured. Amusingly, this took place over film of the man himself inspecting the pitch below with his team mates - the cameras arrived just in time to see him remove a piece of chewing gum from his mouth, which he threw in to Phil Neville's hair.

Sight of Phil Neville led to another discussion, involving Buzzing Bobby and the second of the night's guests, Blackburn Rovers' manager Roy Hodgson, on the young Manchester United contingent in the England squad.

Roy, fluent in Italian after years of working on the Continent, spent the week working as Glenn Hoddle's interpreter in Italy but his translating services were needed again as Saturday's viewers struggled to understand some of Buzzing Bobby's expert analysis. Bobby: "The young Manchester players are two years older than what they really are." Roy: "The young Manchester players are very mature for their years."

Meanwhile, over on Sky News, reporter Mark Saggers was explaining why there would be no trouble from the English fans in Rome. "What went wrong in Lansdowne Road in Dublin was that there were lots of metal, rickety, old seats around the stadium which the English fans used as missiles to throw on to the pitch. Here the police have been checking all the seats and if there's been anything loose they've been ripping it up and throwing it away," he explained. So, the moral of the story, according to Mark, was get rid of your rickety seats and the dodgy section of England fans will be as good as gold. "Everyone is behaving themselves and England's fans are doing their team and their country proud right now," he continued.

Twenty minutes in to the match and a shot of a large group of English fans having a little tete-a-tete with some over excited Italian police flashed up on the screen. Commentator Martin Tyler, clearly believing it was a nasty apparition of some kind, ignored it until he could ignore it no more.

"You may have noticed a few moments ago a disturbance in the crowd - well WE were disturbed to hear that the Italian authorities were selling tickets to England fans in the Italian sections of the ground . . . and that's bound, given the highly charged emotional atmosphere of this fixture, to lead to some sort of confrontation."

"Aw, that's barmy Martin, if that's the case then the Italian FA certainly have some questions to answer," said a shocked Andy Gray. So now the blame had been removed from the shoulders of the rickety seats, and moved to the Italian FA for not controlling their touts. Everyone's fault except the poor, unfortunate, provoked minority of yobs that follow England around Europe?

Full time and the Italian Job had been completed. "TAKE THAT ITALIA," declared a defiant Richard Keys. Hardly an appropriate summing up of the evening's depressing viewing.

The Olympic Stadium in Rome was one of the many venues graced by Paul McGrath during his international career and, on Friday night, that career was honoured in a special Late Late Show tribute. "Paul had too much ability to play at centre back, far too much," said centre back Jack Charlton in his tribute to McGrath. He later apologised for his "derogatory comments" when he spotted Kevin Moran, and a few other disgruntled centre backs, sitting in the audience.

Perhaps as a result of the free Guinness being supplied on the night much of the audience seemed more intent on making it a tribute to Paul's drinking ability over the years than his, em, Pure Genius on the field of play. Indeed, half way through the show many of the familiar faces in the audience could barely sit up in their chairs. By the time Gay got to one of them (no names) he was so ossified his tribute went something like this . . . "Paul . . . blurrgh . . . United . . . glug . . . glug . . . blurrgh". Moving.

Members of the current Irish squad, including Tony Cascarino, paid their own tribute to McGrath from their hotel at Dublin Airport. By Saturday afternoon Cascarino was coming to terms with one of the strangest questions he had ever been asked in his career. "Of course you now play your club football with Nancy in France," said Ger Canning to Ireland's goal-scorer in the match against Romania. "Does that make you a Nancy boy?" "Yeah," said Cascarino, who's used to answering these post-match questions in auto-pilot. "NO! I'M NOT," he insisted, having quickly shifted back in to manual.