Sunday's settled A-team of analysts hit the right note

TV VIEW:SLICK, WELL-PACED, informed, passionate. Let us count the ways RTÉ bless us with so much of its major-event sports coverage, and give thanks .

The dullest soccer game is leavened by the Giles, Billo and Dunphy show. Sure, one of them’s an attention-seeker of puerile proportions, but as former head of sport Tim O’Connor said when asked why he’d brought Eamo on board: “Dunphy’s box office.”

Pedestrian rugby games are by and large enlivened by the three-ring circus that is Hook, Popey and McGurk. Admittedly, McGurk’s antediluvian slip shows when he has to leave the boys’ club (ask anyone who heard him being skewered on 4FM last week by Susan McKay of the National Women’s Council), but the triumvirate’s still a working gestalt of the familiar.

The common factor across the various analysis teams is surely raw enthusiasm: pulsing, real, heartfelt joie de vivre, and a love for their games that transmits with immediacy to the viewer.

RTÉ trumpeted Three Days of Football Mania! It promised a Bank Holiday weekend to make any Irish sports enthusiast salivate. Three fascinating quarter-final pairings, plus a Saturday evening appetiser.

Saturday night’s trio had their analytical work cut out for them. Ye gods, but Limerick vs Meath would have tested the faith of the most dyed-in-the-wool Gaelic football aficionado: a game between two poor teams – the sole saving grace was it was tight. As a showcase for the game’s virtues, all you could say was it had a beginning, a muddle and an end.

The TV team didn’t try a hard sell. Daragh Moloney called it straight, and had the calm experience of Kevin McStay’s clued-in perspective. At one point, soon after a Limerick goal, and as Meath’s Cian Ward shaped to take a free from the hands, McStay said he should be kicking from the ground. Ward duly missed.

The analysts were of a quality that’s easy to take for granted: Dara Ó Cinnéide and Anthony Tohill have been there, done it all and exude a glic knowledgeability that’s still pleasantly represented. Ringmaster Michael Lyster has become, along with Des Cahill, a relaxed treasure on TV.

Yesterday, we got more of the professional and pleasing same. Attempts to talk up Donegal as a potential tripwire for a Cork team that might be undercooked because of the long gap since the Munster final were quickly set aside when it became obvious the game was a mismatch.

The Sunday trio for the double-bill quarters now has the settled air of the A-team. There’s the conversational chemistry that comes with time. Not afraid to disagree with one another; each respectful of the other; contrasting voices, choired in an a cappella commentariat.

Colm O’Rourke, as tough a Meath hoor as you’d find in his playing days, avuncular and measured on screen. Joe Brolly, pure, cheeky Derry: neither viewers nor himself, one suspects, can be certain what he’ll say next. And Pat Spillane, no longer spancelled by ringmaster responsibilities, but perhaps still somewhat sobered as that chairing melody lingers on. The Kerry-glic slagmeister who gave us the immortal “puke football” label is still not back to his old pomp,it seems. Perhaps like many self-made media men, he worships his creator a bit still?

There wasn’t much grist for the analysis mill from Donegal’s capitulation, but the choristers had a crack at it.

O’Rourke sounded off at a Cork full-back line that yielded two goals late-ish in the game. Brolly chimed in that teenaged Donegal wunderkind Michael Murphy had already toyed with Derry’s defenders in a qualifier game. Spillane hit the last note: “There’s no point in serious analysis of that game.”

Tyrone-Kildare was at another remove. At half-time in a tight engrossing game O’Rourke summed up: Kildare needed to overcome the fear of winning, he felt, whereas Tyrone had their own, deep fear of losing. He was prescient. “Praise where praise is due,” said Spillane. “I expected a classic game. We got one.”

The former US chief justice, Earl Warren, used to turn to the sports pages first each morning because there he found a record of people’s accomplishments. On the front page, he reckoned, there was little but man’s failures.

Isn’t sport trivial, ephemeral, even irrelevant, in the greater scheme of things? Sure. Tell that to the near-50,000 in Croker yesterday, or the full house this afternoon. The bread-and-circuses relief for most of us, unable to get to Croker, is mediated through RTÉ, whose television coverage of these major occasions is consistently good to very good. From the cathedral of Croker, a welcome benediction.

Fact: I have a contractual radio relationship with the broadcaster; my mind’s my own.