TV VIEW:WE'VE LEARNT the last while that Stephen Hunt has much the same approach to chatting with the media as he does to his football, a kind of fire-in-the-belly, kamikaze, devil-may-care, give-it-a-lash style that is as honest as it is entertaining. But it isn't always guaranteed to win him friends. Especially in the place they call the Model County.

Ryan Tubridy: "Your fiancee?"

Hunty: "Joanne. She comes from Wexford, country place, but she's up with the times, to be fair to her."

"She's up with the times?"

"Yeah, she's going with the flow. Most people from Wexford are maybe a little bit behind the times."

The din you can hear is the indignant Wexford folk furiously pointing to the fact Hunt was born in Laois and raised in Waterford, and for a born-in-Laois-raised- in-Waterford man to be picking on Wexford on the issue of being behind the times is akin to making Robert Mugabe the next head of the UN's election-monitoring unit. We, though, are steering well clear of the squabble.

Any way, we always immensely enjoy listening to Hunty because he's yet to master the Premier League footballers' art of talking plenty but saying nothing, and diplomacy is his enemy.

The Stephen Ireland issue, for example, remains a delicate and sensitive one, as Tubridy acknowledged when he put it to Hunty that the Manchester City man was "bald one day and had loads of hair the next".

"Yeah," said Hunty, evidently conscious of just how sensitive the issue is, "we were talking behind his back, 'where did the hair come from'?"

Talking behind his back?

"Stabbing him in the back, yeah," he said, gesturing with an imaginary knife, "but not messing with him face to face."

D'you know, Giovanni Trapattoni couldn't possibly have any idea what challenges lie ahead. We had this vision of Liam Brady getting on the phone to him on Saturday night and explaining there was a problem: Hunty was on Tubridy talking about Irelandy's hair and stabbing him in the back, so the next squad get-together (if Irelandy accepts his invitationy), could be lively.

The good thing, though, is that Hunty respects authority, so if Trapattoni says "jump" he'll say . . . well, probably "why"?

"I was caught for speeding on the main Waterford-Wexford road. A garda pulled me in, had a laugh with me, I promised him two tickets for Man United if he let me off. That didn't work."

Later that evening Hunty and his pal came upon the scene of the crime again: "The speed camera was still on the ground, he must have put it on his roof and it fell off."

His pal decided to test the speed camera to see if it was still working. He ran up and down past it. "He was clocked at eight miles an hour," Hunty revealed.

"The next morning the nice garda from Wexford came back, picked his gun up, I didn't have to give it back to him, but. He gave me a lift to the town, I left my washbag in the car and I've never seen him since."

It could be, though, that the Wexford garda is so behind the times he hasn't got around to returning Hunty his wash bag yet or applying his penalty points, but we have a feeling he's settling down to the task as we speak.

The good news, though, was that our favourite Irish player revealed himself to be content at his club, so that was nice.

"Are you happy in Reading?" asked Tubridy.

"Yeah, it's close to Heathrow," he said.

Speaking of commitment: Setanta Sports. Their build-up to the Joe Calzaghe v Bernard Hopkins fight on Saturday night/Sunday morning began at 10.30, about five hours before a punch was thrown.

True, we had the odd undercard scrap to keep us awake, like Audley Harrison's fight with a lad we reckoned would crumble in a heap if we tossed our lipstick at him. Audley won, but Barry McGuigan was reluctant to gush. "He's not strong around the old Vera Lynn," he said of Audley, which we took as a bad thing.

Any way, many hours later Calzaghe won on points, despite leaving Hopkins a touch winded by a punch on the low side. The post-bout interviewer, a man called Max, put it to Hopkins that the punch in question "did not seem to land in a debilitating spot", at which point an aggrieved Hopkins, by now sounding like Aled Jones singing The Snowman, pointed to the spot and declared: "That's my crotch, I ain't gonna ask you to feel it, but it's right there." Max took him at his word.

There's talk of a re-match in Wales, appropriately the home of Aled Jones. "We'll meet again," Hopkins might, then, have been humming as he left Las Vegas, but if he loses again in Cardiff he'll just have to take it on the Vera Lynn.

Setanta Ireland's new series on Irish sportswomen - Winning Women - starts tonight at 9.30. The first in the eight-part series, Born to Run, profiles Kilkenny's Joanne Cuddihy.