TV VIEW:THAT WAS a wintry old weekend, enough to have you pining for a trip to somewhere sultry, like, say, West Cocoa Beach, or the stands at Sunderland's Stadium of Light where such heat was generated on Saturday the perspiration would have been pouring from you if you were wearing anything other than a frown.

Setanta's sound people, you have to assume, were worn out by full-time from fiddling with their volume buttons, attempting to mute those cries of "Chimbonda! You're a useless beeping . . . ." just before they got really offensive.

Pascal Chimbonda wasn't, it should be clarified, the only target of abuse; the entire Sunderland team plus subs having their parentage and nocturnal activities also called in to question.

Still, if you ever found yourself in the trenches with Chimbonda and fellow Sunderland defender - and we're using the word so loosely here it's dangling in a disembodied kind of way - Danny Collins, you'd hoist a white flag and say: "Take me as a prisoner, I'm all yours."

"They're like snowmen, the Sunderland defence - as soon as Bolton turn the pressure up they melt," Pat Dolan wept at half-time, shaking his head so repeatedly and so incredulously, Paul Dempsey was dizzy from trying to maintain eye contact.

By full-time, Pat was lost for words. Kidding. Pat was effusive in his, well, despair and downheartedness, the SundIreland rebellion seemingly going the way of most Irish uprisings - well-intentioned but ultimately unsuccessful, in a catastrophic but melancholically romantic sort of way.

From Wolfe Tone in 1798 to Quinner and Keano 210 years later - as someone famous once said, "Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it."

In fairness, though, Tone wasn't depending on Pascal Chimbonda for a decent result, although, it should be said in his defence, he'd hardly have left El Hadji Diouf as an unused sub when the opposition was his former club.

Diouf would, surely, have been up for it. For the match, that is, not necessarily for the battle at Lough Swilly.

"Kick me while I'm down, why don't you?" Pat's face must have said to Paul because the latter provoked the former by asking if it was time for Roy to go.

Pat bristled at the suggestion, pointing out that Sunderland weren't good enough for a man of Roy's stature. And, unbowed, he still insisted the safest place to put Anton Ferdinand of a Saturday afternoon was the bench, where his ability to damage his own team was somewhat restricted, and that while the current mood might be Forlorn At Sunderland (FAS), time might yet sort things out.

We can but hope. Although: "It's like taking sweets off a baby," said Tony Gubba on Match of the Daylater that night as he surveyed the wreckage that is the Sunderland defence. Back on RTÉ, Kenny Cunningham, briefly a member of that very defence, was telling Darragh Maloney how Roy would deal with the crisis.

"Some players need a pat on the back and an arm around the shoulder, other players will literally need to be pinned against the dressingroom wall," he said, and all we could do was picture the Sunderland Fire and Rescue Service attempting to unscrew Pascal and Danny from the Stadium of Light ceiling on Saturday night, while Roy and Triggs reached the outskirts of John O'Groats on their "cooling off" walk.

Whether Roy and Triggs were home in time to watch the Manchester derby we can't say, but they wouldn't have missed a great deal, apart from Ronaldo's sending off. Had he handled the ball because he heard a whistle? That was the bone of contention, a bone Triggs might happily have chewed, but one that gave Jamie Redknapp stomach cramp.

"That's not a noise like a whistle - it's like what you'd hear at a hockey match, or somefing," he said when himself, Ruud Gullit and Richard Keys strained to listen to the replay.

"Um, I don't know, it sounds a little like a whistle also," Ruud sort of said.

"Na! That's not a whistle," insisted Jamie.

"Hmmm," said Richard.

"That was a horn," Jamie declared. "It doesn't even sound like a whistle! That's a horn!"

"Hmmm," said Ruud, "he must have heard something also."

"YEAH BUT: IT'S NOT A WHISTLE - IT'S A HORN," said Jamie, by now becoming so emotional about the subject we just wanted Ruud and Richard to calm him by agreeing it WAS a horn.

Even by the time the Chelsea v Arsenal game concluded, Jamie still seemed occupied by the whistle/horn issue, although, to be honest about it, this couch didn't care any more, so chuffed was it by Arsenal's triumph. Not chuffed because we dislike Chelsea - because we do - more because Arsene Wenger could come over all gloriously nonchalant in his post-match interview, because gloriously nonchalant is Arsene Wenger's right.

"Ah, if it ain't Dutch, it ain't much," Ruud said of Robin van Persie's two goals, to which Jamie wanted to reply "IT'S A HORN".

True, Arsenal will probably lose away to Ramshackle Rovers next week, but, for now, Fabulous Arsene Survives (FAS).