TV VIEW:IT WOULDN'T be entirely accurate to say that last week marked the launch of the "Bring Back Steve Staunton and Eddie O'Sullivan, All Is Forgiven" campaigns, but we did detect in our RTÉ football and rugby panels a slight disenchantment with the new regimes, even if Giovanni Trapattoni and Declan Kidney have only been in their respective posts a wet week or six.
The exile of Andy Reid continued to exercise Billo and the boys on Wednesday night, after Ireland were blessed to only lose 3-2 to Poland, the defending so nightmarishly Nicosian you reckoned it was Denis Irwin, Paul McGrath, Kevin Moran and Chris Hughton we should be urging Trapattoni to recall.
It was, possibly, Ray Clemence who once said of that little Romanian wizard Gheorghe Hagi "he could open a tin of beans with his left foot", a compliment Don Howe attempted to echo when he declared that Hagi had "a left foot like Brian Lara's bat".
If Hagi was the "Maradona of the Carpathians", in many ways Reidy has become our "Maradona of the Crumlins", his absence making the heart go bumpety, bumpety bump in the belief that his return will herald a golden age of Irish football go halainn. It most probably won't, although we would, at least, have a player capable of picking out a tasty pass or two.
Still, we can't help but feeling Reidy is fretting about this consensus that he is the answer to all our footballing prayers, and that if/when he returns the nation, as one, will anticipate a performance of Cruyff-ish proportions, and anything less will lead them to conclude that Trap was probably right after all.
No pressure, Reidy.
What we do know for sure is that Trap's middle names aren't "Let me entertain you", something RTÉ's rugby lads concluded could also be said of Kidney after Saturday's bout with Argentina. "Who let the air out of our tyres," asked Ryle Nugent when he noted a certain lack of atmosphere at Croke Park, the crowd only getting excited when the final whistle was imminent.
"This team is now playing as badly as it did 12 months ago in the World Cup," said George Hook, attempting to account for this indifference.
But himself got tremendously excited after Tony Ward named Ronan O'Gara his man of the match, a decision with which George disagreed "a zillion per cent".
"He didn't deserve it as a man, as a rugby player or as a tactical player," he said. Great drop goal, though, his colleagues countered. "Hold it a while now - that's like saying 'well done Tiger Woods for your sweater'." And he, well, alleged that the man they call ROG had been "petulant" and had gone "looking for trouble" during the game, and had been a significant contributor to the uglier aspects of the afternoon.
Mercifully - because the sight of blood leaves us queasy - O'Gara evidently hadn't heard George's comments when he appeared for his man-of-the-match chat with Tracy Piggott, declaring that a win's a win's a win, so all was well enough. "That kind of win is like World War I," said George, "getting 100 yards and losing a million men in the process".
Disenchantment, then, is the only word for it, although you could also choose gloom, despondency, despair, dejection, anguish and pessimism and not be wrong at all.
At a time like that what you need is a song to lift your heart. Like, say, "Hold me now, don't cry, don't say a word, just hold me now, and I will know, 'though we're apart, we'll always be together, forever in love, what do you say when words are not enough?" Indeed. "Who do you think will be your gamebreaker today," asked Tony O'Donoghue. "Well, not Johnny Logan any way," said Bohemians manager Pat Fenlon as he tried to give his pre-FAI-Cup-final thoughts to RTÉ, while Johnny, darling of the Bohs' brigade, belted out his much loved tune in the background.
A belter of a cup final it was too, with Derry City's Sammy Morrow at the centre of just about every - and there were bundles of them - major incident in the game.
There was Bib-gate too, Fenlon being asked by the officials to don an orange bib so the referee's assistant wouldn't adjudge Bohs to be in a permanent state of offsidedness through the game, and there was Roddy Collins calling Owen Heary a cheat for falling over an imaginary leg/being hacked down at the edge of the box, the pundit extraordinaire noting that the Bohs captain's legs were "getting shorter and shorter" as he approached the box. "Right," said Peter Collins, while Damien Richardson wiggled his eyebrows in a puzzled kind of way.
Penalties. "The penalties have been, dare I say it, spot on," said Morley, just before Kevin Deery had his saved and Mark Rossiter sent his over the bar and Ruaidhri Higgins had his saved. The double for Bohs, then, and with that Johnny Logan was back on pitch. What do you say when words are not enough?
