TV View: Saturday afternoon Network Two. For sports jocks the schedule stretched out like one of those endless landing strips Americans build in deserts for their behemoth planes to take off and land for long-range raids.

From 4.30 p.m. onwards the couch potato could sit down and launch into sporting heaven without so much as the shifting of a buttock. This was a mid-air fuelling job for the B52 of sports programming.

Beyond the contorted face of George Hook and the strident tones of the studio whip cracker, Tom McGurk, in the station's coverage of Munster's Heineken European Cup quarter-final against Stade Francais, The Premiership rested in the middle distance.

On the horizon, the Masters golf coverage shimmered, one long, seamless run of sport from 4.30 p.m. to 11.30 p.m. Seven hours. Hats off.

Alas, while the rugby and soccer did their job, who would watch Masters Golf on the national network? What appeared to be largely CBS commentary and coverage was okayish. But all of those commercials?

Sports fans all over the world should deify Martha Burk. Ms Burk should be hailed as the great rescuer of unsullied sports coverage. Burk last year led her women's organisation against the chauvinist Augusta National club. The result was the private millionaire patrons decided to run the tournament sponsor-free in order not to embarrass their regular commercial clients.

They did it again this year, which seemed to give the BBC a three-hour stretch without Steve Ryder having to says things like, "We'd just like to explain to our viewers that CBS have gone to commercials and that's why you are seeing shots of lakes and endless leaderboards."

Peter Alliss is a BBC commentator you can take a dislike to. His honeyed, homesy, folksy style can be a constant irritation for some, but he does raise the odd laugh. And, at a basic level, he does simplify the game - no doubt to an audience of punters who think they are golf experts because they've handicaps of 15 and custom-made clubs.

That's where the hate comes in for Alliss. Some of his comments wouldn't be tolerated on CBS, who like their golf commentary very much buddy-buddy and sex- free.

Alliss and Ken Brown were commenting on the claw grip Chris DiMarco uses when he's putting. It's a most unnatural looking style, whereby he holds the shaft normally with his left hand and painfully clutches it lower down like a crab with his right hand.

"I haven't seen a grip like that since they demolished the old gents behind Kings Cross," observed Alliss, moving the golf from Augusta lakes to London lavatories in one choreographed move.

Allis didn't elaborate as to whether it was an old hang-out but Brown was shortly on the theme as well. Brown walks the course and rolls balls down greens at pin placements to show the viewers the severity of some of the slopes and the worst places to be if you are a player.

The par three, 13th hole over water was one such test. Brown knocked his ball from one part of the green and off it went charging past the hole, through the green and into the water. "It's a shorty," observed Brown. "But by golly, it can get you by the goolies."

Tender areas also occupied Ernie Els. A hand-held camera caught the ball of Els moving when he attempted to pick up the branch of a tree in which it was nestled after smashing a drive miles into a forest.

No one actually observed the breech of rule, not even Els himself. But the slow-motion camera did. Up went the large tangled piece of tree and off lurched the ball. Not only did the South African escape a two-shot penalty but a crusty old member trundled on to the scene to declare that Augusta would never be so shoddy as to allow their green keepers leave a piece of tree lying around, albeit deep in the rough, without fully intending to remove it.

It was therefore not part of the course and Els was given relief. That seemed to save him three shots, two for moving (or not moving) the ball and another for the free drop.

Information, you see is everything. It can make you or break you. Before the Munster rugby match, commentator Jim Sherwin set the scene in Thomond Park. "Perfect conditions, no breeze today," he says. Not long afterwards Ryle Nugent, RTÉ's man at pitch side, informed us of the conditions.

"Stiff breeze," he says. "That's why Dominguez didn't kick at goal." At half-time Mick Galwey weighs in. "Stiff breeze," he says before McGurk joins the chorus.

"Gotta tell you, Munster enjoyed the wind first half," he growls before going off to a break.