TV View There was, to this couch at least, an inevitability about the outcome of Saturday's little contest at Lansdowne Road the very moment South African coach Jake White paid tribute to Irish rugby by saying that Brian O'Driscoll might get on his team, Paul O'Connell and Malcolm O'Kelly would be "there or thereabouts", but that was it.

Fast forward to Eddie O'Sullivan's pre-match chat. "Girvan, Geordan, Shane, Denis, Ronan, Peter, Anthony, Johnny, Simon, John, Shane and Reggie? You heard what Mr White said. Now, out you go."

In motivational terms, then, O'Sullivan was able to do what Phil Bennett did for Wales back in the '70s when he gave that much celebrated dressing-room speech ahead of a Five Nations' meeting with England in Cardiff.

("Look at what these bastards have done to Wales. They've taken our coal, our steel, our water. They buy up all our houses then only live in them for a fortnight a year. We've been exploited, raped, controlled and punished by the English - that's who you're playing today.")

Job done. Lads up for it. Victory unavoidable. But George Hook and Brent Pope still seemed to believe ability and experience and tactics and mentality and the backs and the forwards and inconsequential stuff like that would actually play a part in the game. Hard to credit.

"Two words on your mind about this afternoon, George?" asked Tom McGurk.

"Worry, worry," said George.

Lots of things were worrying George, not least Schalk Burger, a fella happy to have his head forged into the shape of a horseshoe if it means winning a loose ball. "This is a guy who puts his head where a blacksmith wouldn't put an anvil," as George put it.

And the size of them?

"Huge beefy fellas," said Tom.

"Yeah," said George, "last summer Eddie O'Sullivan said they were 17 lbs a man heavier, now it's down to about 12, but they're enooooormous men".

Still, the reduction in the weight difference was encouraging. Either the 'Boks had been on the Atkins Diet or Ireland had been on the Atkinson Diet. The Ron Atkinson diet, that is (copyright: Rodney Marsh).

"Have you ever seen our scrum demolished?" Tom asked.

"The fifth amendment to the American constitution says you need not incriminate yourself so I'm not going to answer that question," said George, before answering it. "I have seen the Irish scrum demolished and there is a real possibility it could be in trouble today.

"South Africa by six or seven points, I would think," he concluded.

O'Sullivan tried to reassure the panel via Tracy Piggott - "It's not the dog in the fight, it's the fight in the dog," - but they still didn't understand that all the horseshoe heads in the world wouldn't save South Africa, their coach's lip had sealed their fate.

So, of course, Ireland won.

"How many would you have now, Jake?" asked Tracey, post-match.

"Ah, I'd pick 'em all," said White.

("Sorry Jake, we're sticking with the team going places," Dempsey, Murphy, Horgan, Hickie, O'Gara, Stringer, Foley, O'Connor, Easterby, Hayes, Byrne and Corrigan might have replied if they'd been asked.)

Still, George wouldn't concede that Jake had won it for Ireland, he put it down to Ronan O'Gara's diet. "He's been fed on drisheen, buckets of it," he said.

(For the uninitiated the recipe is: milk, water, breadcrumbs, salt, mutton suet and . . . two pints of sheep's blood. If O'Gara's blood is tested by the International Rugby Board they'll re-categorise him as a ram. A battering ram, perhaps?)

O'Driscoll, on the other hand, is a wolf in sheep's clothing on a rugby pitch. That hair-do and the tuft on his chin might make him look as menacing as a member of Kajagoogoo, but he doesn't tackle like he's too shy, shy. Nor, indeed, is he shy about slugging from those bottles during his post-match interviews. The more Tom, George and Brent object the harder he'll slug - deadlock.

There doesn't seem to be much sign of a breakthrough either in Ron Atkinson's attempts to rebuild his career after being caught on air calling Marcel Desailly a "f***ing lazy, thick n****r".

"What upset me more than anything was it sounded kind of vicious, the way you said it," Frank Skinner said to him on his ITV show last week.

"You didn't hear the way I said it, nobody has," declared Ron.

"I have actually," said Skinner, informing Ron that the clip has been available on the internet since the words left his mouth.

Ron, for once, was speechless. If nobody had heard it he could have claimed he'd said "f***ing lazy, thick n****r" in a gentle, non-racist, inoffensive way.