SPORT ON TELEVISION

IT was a calm week and, after the Olympic storm, there were very few complaining

IT was a calm week and, after the Olympic storm, there were very few complaining. Little enough to pick from on television, although the presence in the schedules of a documentary on Eric Hall was always going to be worth, at the very least, a mention.

As it turned out Ray Hough's film, part of the short Channel Four Filthy Rich series, was one of the more entertaining insights into the workings of big money football to be screened over the past year or so.

At half an hour, the film may have been too short as well as a little soft on its subject, but here was an attempt to expose the way that the game is really being run these days with its endless fascination with celebrity and cash.

Hall is, by all of the accounts given, a nice guy. Simply an agent for players (he represents Dennis Wise and Neil Ruddock among others) who attempts to ensure that they get the best deal possible from their employers and yet he is despised for his efforts.

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Clubs claim that agents attempt to persuade players to look for transfers so that they can pick up more commission, while fans blame the increased wages for the increasingly crazy admission prices in England. Yet the players have come to look on these men as the only people to stand between them and the exploitation of years gone by.

The programme was packed with farce with Hall repeatedly insisting that, as he is unlicensed by the FA just now, he is not attempting to set, up any deals at all, but then cheerily winking at the camera, puffing one his cigar (he spends £12,000 a year. on them) and openly hinting that this was not the case.

Even at a time, though, when the average wage in the Premiership is approaching £5,000 a week - and by the looks of Hall trying to negotiate free Yves Saint Laurent suits for Wise and all of his Chelsea team-mates, they seem to have precious little to spend it on - it is difficult to argue against the presence of such people on the scene, especially in a week when the football authorities appeared determined to renege on all of their existing agreements concerning payments to the Professional Footballers' Association.

Representing a player is one thing, though, while representing both the club and the player is another. At a time when many managers in the game in England, and elsewhere, are simply out of their depth when asked to negotiate multi-million pound contracts, that is perhaps the side of the agent's trade that Hough might have much more profitably explored.

NONE of it would have happened during the great days, of course, as could clearly be seen from the latest instalment of Match Of The Seventies (BBC 1 Monday). This week the programme moved into the second half of the decade the average weekly wage bill for an entire club was £5,000 and most of them were having considerable trouble paying it.

Most amusing though, was the sighs of Brian Talbot professing bewilderment that Bbbby Robson had decided to break the British transfer record by signing Paul Mariner from Plymouth for £220,000.

Apparently none of the players at Ipswich had ever heard much of Manner before his arrival despite the fact that he had firmly established himself as a prolific goalscorer in the lower divisions. It would never happen these days Mr Hall and his mates would see to that.

BACK on the domestic front, meanwhile those not sleeping off the jetlag from the trans-Atlantic flight home were holding the fort out in Montrose as the Dublin Horse Show provided the week's main focus of attention.

Tracey Piggott was fronting things and, after her brief stint on Games duty, it was nice to see her back on very familiar territory.

Throughout the coverage of the RDS event she looked entirely at home with the brief, something that she had not always appeared to be when she and Peter Collins were pulling things together on their joint Olympic shifts.

Collins, of course, always looks entirely at ease when compared with the figure he cut in the Lansdowne Road tunnel earlier this year when, one after another, Irish international rugby players approached him to be interviewed only to be met by a man who would probably have had only slightly less luck guessing their names if they had been Russian physicists.

Making it clear with your opening comment that you have absolutely no idea who you are talking to is not generally an ideal route to a good and insightful interview. The very fact that Collins should find himself in this position is a sad reflection on our national broadcaster. British stations generally allow their Journalists paid time to familiarise themselves with their subjects in advance. At Montrose, there is a tendency to allow people to sink or swim.

Emmet Malone

Emmet Malone

Emmet Malone is Work Correspondent at The Irish Times