While most of a nation groaned, wept, gnashed and took a closer look at the sitting-room carpet last Saturday evening, Goran Stavreski's injury-time bullet-header for Macedonia sent a significant minority of punters rooting happily through their wallets for a valuable betting slip.
There was the small matter of five minutes watching Yugoslavia clinging on to a crucial result against Croatia in Zagreb, but seemingly some teams are better at that than others. With that, legions of Eamon Dunphy listeners had their mixed loyalties rewarded: the three-match combination soccer bet touted on The Last Word (Today FM, Monday to Friday) had come up, and standard £10 gamblers were £200 richer.
It's a remarkable phenomenon that Last Word bet, not least because it appears to arouse so little public antipathy. Dunphy often promises a long-term profit, and Today FM even used the bet as part of its poster campaign. With several thousand per cent return over the last two seasons, it's hardly surprising that the vibe is good; nonetheless, there's no such thing as a sure thing, and just a fortnight ago loyally betting listeners would have been well over £100 down over a period of just a couple of months. Now the bet has come up two weeks running and they're in clover.
Yeah, you guessed it: I'm not on the gravy train. Conflict of interest and all that. (Sob.)
Dunphy is hardly the first presenter to wield significant financial clout; his bet yields small change compared to the cash that was sloshing around rock'n'roll radio in its early days. Mike Dunne's great harmony-group programme, Doo-Wop Street (Anna Livia FM, Wednesday), recalled a benign instance of DJ power - no corruption, just a sound ear.
In 1956, we heard, a few smart DJs flipped over an anonymous rocker from an unknown group on a small label - and found a B-side called In the Still of the Night.
"It took off like a rocket," said Dunne's guest Bob Noguera, on the telephone from his New York oldies record shop. The Five Satins' In the Still of the Night was picked up by a larger label. To this day, when oldies' giant WCBS radio in New York conducts a survey among its listeners, it comes out as the top track, leaving Heartbreak Hotel, Good Vibrations etc in the ha'penny place.
You might be tempted to laugh at some of these old rock'n'rollers. Noguera's exciting news from New York was of an upcoming gig featuring Jay and the Americans, Kenny Vance and the Planetones and other wonderfully named senior citizens. Still, I'd imagine more people here care about this music than a lot of the stuff that gets a hearing on Lyric FM. Dunne devoted most of Wednesday's programme to the story of Fred Parris and his Five Satins, who are still going ("strong" I don't know about) 43 years later.
Sadly, doo-wop-style oldies from the 1950s and early 1960s are unlikely to feature on the new over-35 station, Lite FM. Similarly, country music may be beloved of listeners outside the capital and of the pirates at Radio Dublin, but it seems Lite's research suggests it's a "turn-off" - so don't expect to hear George Jones between Fleetwood Mac and Celine Dion records when Lite comes on-air in the spring.
Mid-century radio was one of the preoccupations of an intriguing Play of the Week (RTE Radio 1, Tuesday), Stephen Buck's Stormy Weather. Buck has shown in other works that he has a particular fascination with the highly specific dramatic possibilities of the medium, and in this play he flings around knowing references to the glory days of BBC radio drama.
The central character is an old Beeb sound-effects man, now in lonely retirement in London - where his wife left him in the early Sixties, taking their daughters too, to return to Ireland. Now a grown-up daughter comes to visit, and she hears for the first time about how Dad worked at Broadcasting House with the likes of Harold Pinter and Samuel Beckett.
What comes next has a certain air of Beckett, a whiff of Krapp if you like. As a storm rages outside and father and daughter share a whiskey or two, it emerges that the shelves of cassette tapes lining his flat contain, not highlights from his BBC career, but ordinary moments of domestic life - scenes from a marriage, really, including the conceptions of the two children.
"Not that you'd recognise that's what it was," he explains, "neither your mother or I was particularly demonstrative . . ." The daughter, who appears to have inherited her mother's sanity, isn't interested in testing his assertion. She listens, however, to the sound of her mother washing her hands, of her sister getting a splinter in her eye at a Guy Fawkes bonfire, of herself chasing airplanes across Kew Gardens.
Stormy Weather is a fine work, throwing up ideas and emotions about memory and the ambiguous meaning of different sorts of "records". A bugged phone call, for example, seems to indicate that the man's wife had had an affair; he doesn't believe it, because, in another conversation, she told him otherwise.
Henry Kissinger would no doubt agree about the unreliability of taped evidence. No, don't mind the madness on the Nixon tapes, the malevolence, the paranoia, the anti-semitism, etc - that's what he told Pat on Today with Pat Kenny (RTE Radio 1, Monday to Friday). No, tapes don't really reflect how policy was made, he said - look instead to the carefully prepared memoranda of Richard Nixon's White House staff.
Somehow, I believe in the madness.
Harry Browne can be contacted at hbrowne@irish-times.ie