TV View:All that Grand Slam talk on RTÉ yesterday made us fretful, so we switched for a bit to the BBC in the hope of bumping in to more sober and sobering chat. "O'Connell! O'Gara! O'Driscoll! Oh to be an Irish coach with talent like that," John Inverdale swooned, before asking Keith Wood about Ireland's Grand Slam prospects.
No escaping it, then. Although Brent Pope was insistent that we shouldn't even try to escape the very plain and quite evident fact that in Northern Hemisphere rugby terms we are the master race.
George Hook, need it be said, was having none of it, politely reminding Popie that that class of talk was all very well for a Kiwi, but the Irish just don't do bristling self-confidence with any great comfort. The more they're talked up the harder they fall, you know yourself.
"Poppycock", was the gist of Popie's retort, citing Roy Keane, Sonia O'Sullivan and Keith Wood as examples of previous Irish sporting warriors who refused to apologise for their existence or contemplate defeat, and this Irish squad, he said, took their inspiration from the trio.
Was George persuaded? "I'm in bits here, I could throw up my yoghurt all over my velvet jacket," he said, so we took that as a no. "Steve Davis missed the black," he reminded us. "Ah but: Dennis Taylor didn't," Popie would have replied if he'd ever heard of snooker.
Back on the BBC Inverdale was semi-apologetic for taking up a large chunk of his Wales v Ireland preview time by talking about Jonny Wilkinson. For those who left the planet on Saturday for a day trip to Jupiter, Jonny made a moderately sensational return to international rugby for England against Scotland - indeed, the officials at Twickenham were so impressed they even awarded him a try despite it not actually being one.
Inverdale was almost tearful as he recalled Jonny's heroics. "What was your verdict on Wilkinson, Keith?" he asked the Wood man. "Decidedly average," he said. With a grin. "No, he was absolutely incredible," he conceded, a verdict shared by the RTÉ panel the day before. Mind you, George was so confident pre-match that Jonny and England would have a good day he bet his "terracotta jacket" on them triumphing.
"What colour is that," asked Popie a day later, when George threatened to unleash yoghurt all over his Sunday afternoon jacket. "Plum," he replied. Popie winced, as did the colour control on our telly: when we finally managed to tone down the plum, Wales and Ireland were playing in black and white. As Ted Lowe once so famously put it, "for those watching in black and white the yellow's next to the blue", so to be treated to green and red we had to compromise and accept the plum.
George, then, was nervous, and, as he feared, Ireland took a while to settle, not scoring their opening try until the 46th second. After that? Well, "all the pleasure has come from Wales, they're sparkling," as Wood put it at half-time.
Still, Ireland led, albeit less than convincingly. As the team took to the pitch for the second half Tom McGurk spotted Brian O'Driscoll. "What's he thinking, George?," he asked. "He's thinking 'this could cost me about a million bucks in advertising revenue'." Oh . . . cripes. "Come on," gasped Tom. "I'm serious. Financially this is a disaster," said George.
Back in the commentary box Ryle Nugent busied himself with some damage limitation - "I'm certain the last thing on Brian O'Driscoll's mind is money" - but you fear it may not have been enough. Should George find himself wandering through the Irish dressingroom any day soon it's a terracotta flak jacket he'll need on his back.
Anyway, all was well that ended well: a poor performance, three tries and a 10-point win. An immoral victory? Is there any lovelier? And Croke Park to come.
Speaking of which. What is it about Irish folk and their habit of turning up late for everything, even history-making moments? It looked to us like the only people in Croke Park on Saturday evening when GAA president Nickey Brennan said "let there be light" were Bertie Ahern and Setanta presenter Daire O'Brien.
Come the throw-in, though, there were, by our calculations, 81,355 more people in the stadium than there were at that afternoon's Scottish third division game between Montrose and East Stirling (att: 323).
Montrose won 4-0, Tyrone won by less, but the fact that they prevailed at all was a surprise to Setanta pundit Eugene McGee. "I would say Mickey Harte will be very, very succinct at half-time," he said, "he'll tell them exactly how stupid they are."
If he did, it worked. The lights went out on Dublin. Again.
