Gilesie not able to fake it and Drico can't shake it like Grable

TV VIEW:FAR BE it from us to make assumptions about how John Giles felt on being summoned to Montrose on a Sunday morning to watch the draw for Euro 2012, but we noted that our hosts in Warsaw, Piotr and Masha, failed to whip him in to a feverish frenzy with promises of good times to be had in Poznan and Lviv.

“I want ask Oleg Blokhin, of course, about what he feels that Euro 2012 is coming to Ukraine in Ukrainian,” said Masha.

While her English, it should be said, is significantly superior to our Ukrainian, we struggled a bit to decipher precisely what she was telling us and, genuinely, thought she described special guest Andrzej Szarmach as “a Polish all-time great who represented his country 61 times with 32 girls”.

“Huh, that puts John Terry in the ha’penny place,” we chuckled, before being put right – it was 32 goals Andrzej scored, not the other.

Any way, Gabriel Egan reminded us that Masha presented the 2005 Eurovision Song Contest which, we pray, is not an omen. In the semi-finals that time Ireland got so many nul points they failed to reach the decider. And most of the nations who gave us nul points are now in our Euro 2012 qualifying group.

If this troubled Gilesie he didn’t let on, but it could just be he felt our tune deserved no more than nothing.

More than anything, though, he just looked like he wanted to be anywhere else, possibly even in a chair having his wisdom teeth extracted by a rusty pliers-wielding dentist suffering from the DTs.

If it’s true you have to speculate to accumulate then Gilesie has steadfastly resisted accumulating all his life, largely because he sees speculation as an utterly pointless exercise.

In that sense, he is the anti-Warren Buffett.

“But it’s all on paper, Peter,” he protested when Collins asked him to sort of speculate about how the Repyblic of Ireland might fare in their group, prompting Peter to turn to Ronnie Whelan in the hope he’d be up for a bit of musing. Fair play, he was.

“There’s nothing really there to frighthen you,” he said, browsing fearlessly through the list of opponents, noting that “Slovakia are the not the greatest team in the world”, which is probably true.

What he failed to comment on, though, was this is the first time since roughly 1543 we didn’t get Cyprus, which surely was worth a mention?

Whatever you think of our draw it’s probably fair to say we won’t top the group by toddling along.

Tom McGurk: “Did you not think we were toddling along?”

Brent Pope: “You can’t toddle along!”

Tom: “Good teams can toddle along.”

Brent: “Declan Kidney would be offended if someone said this team toddled along.”

Tom: “Well, we’ll ask Tracey to ask him if they toddled along. George?”

George Hook: “I thought they were awful.”

If Tom was happy enough – “a win’s a win’s a win” being his view – Brent, George and Conor O’Shea were somewhat less than impressed with the performance against Italy.

“We were going to show you the highlights of the second half, but we can’t because there were none,” said Tom, but he tried to convince George the first half display was grand.

“Ah, hold on,” said George, “Ireland in the first half weren’t exactly Betty Grable.”

Brent and Conor’s wrinkled foreheads suggested to us neither young fella had a notion who Betty Grable was, certainly not that her legs were as cherished in her time as Brian O’Driscoll’s are today.

In a different way, mind.

George, though, was in no mood to doff his cap to O’Driscoll.

“You start to worry when the best thing you can do is to actually compliment his kicking – that’s like complimenting Tiger Woods on his sweaters,” he said. And with that Brent and Conor giggled uncontrollably, prompting Tom to tell them to behave.

John Terry is, of course, now the Tiger Woods of British sport. No, not because they share the same taste in sweaters. Sky News had a helicopter follow him and Fabio Capello to their meeting on Friday, in what was one of the more bizarre broadcasting moments of this or any other time.

Later, on Question Time, the delightful Daily Mail columnist Melanie Phillips ripped Terry asunder, which left us half tempted to order a shirt with his name on the back. That Melanie loathes him may be his last redeeming feature.

“His behaviour for a long time has been one of mass public debauchery,” she proclaimed.

“But he’s not running for Pope – he’s a footballer,” George Galloway reminded her, before wishing Terry’s successor all the luck in the world, not least because he’ll need it.

And with that Rio Ferdinand gulped, and, possibly, started a “Reinstate John Terry NOW” Facebook campaign.