TV View:When a team suffer a drubbing of that magnitude - and worse, live on television on the biggest of stages: the Champions League - you wonder if they'll ever really recover from it, or if it will haunt them for the rest of their careers.

Will it, you wonder, result in them being overcome by fear when another big occasion comes along, so scarred will they be by the shattering experience?

It was as if a careerful of hard work before Tuesday night counted for naught after that 7-1 setback. It might even have been a case of 'arrivederci' to the reputations they had built for themselves.

Sadly, some seemed to take pleasure in the team's mortification - "kick 'em when they're down" kind of thing.

"The phones, I gather, are hopping," said Bill O'Herlihy, with the faintest hint of a grin, which suggested to us that he found his panel's discomfort almost as entertaining as the 90 minutes of football from Old Trafford.

Unlike John Giles and Eamon Dunphy, Liam Brady had, to some extent, earned immunity from the ire of those lighting up the Montrose switchboard - he had, after all, predicted that Roma might be "beatable", which, as it proved, was quite true.

All three, though, had tipped Roma to go through (as, to be truthfully frank, this couch self-assuredly did too - but mercifully our switchboard remained undisturbed, largely because we don't have one), casting sundry doubts on United's credentials.

Dunphy, for example, expressed slight concerns about Rio Ferdinand, calling him "outrageously irresponsible", a man of "very bad character" and "mentally slow".

"You think of John Terry, Carvalho, Ayala, Nesta, Maldini, all the great players in Europe, and we're having this tramp shoved down our throats every week," he said.

United to go out, then.

"I don't think they'll do it tonight because they're playing against good, experienced professionals. Maybe I'll have egg on my face in a few hours' time, but I doubt it," he said.

Cripes, by full-time the chickens of Ireland couldn't lay fast enough to keep up with the demand.

Anyway, need it be said, the mere mention of the R word (hint: the Portuguese King of The Stepovers) had the panel bristling, Billo waving blood-red hankies in front of his three bulls' eyes by telling them the consensus was now that R was not only the greatest player in the world, he was better than Pele, Maradona, Cruyff and Best combined.

Dunphy didn't fully endorse that view, suggesting R was "a puffball who's never done it on the big occasion", putting him at odds with ITV's David Pleat, who compared Ronaldo to "the incomparable George Best".

And then the game started. You know the rest yourself.

"Are you City in disguise?" the United fans asked their visitors, as if they weren't despondent enough already.

At times like this, and we've been there so often it's our second home, it's best just to come out with your hands up, but a defiant Dunphy's "good, experienced professionals" were now a Ragball Rovers outfit who were "18 points behind Inter in Serie A", while Brady, conceding it was a "near-perfect performance", added that it was "against a team that threw the towel in".

Billo accused his panel of begrudgery, particularly on the subject of R. But they stood their ground: R still had an impossible distance to Riverdance before proving he was superior to the game's greats.

On that subject.

"I'm not suggesting that he's not a better player than I was," said - sitting comfortably? - Jimmy Hill on Sky Sports yesterday morning when, discussing R's £31-million-over-five-years deal. He added, somewhat ruefully, "I never played for more than £20 a week."

Guest Shaun Custis was kind enough to resist pointing out that Jimmy wasn't entirely comparing like with like, but, when the subject of R's pin-up status adding to his commercial value popped up, he asked, "Were you a pin-up in your day, Jim?"

"No, I was a chin-up," said Jimmy. The panel laughed. We laughed.

But then we moved on. Jimmy's shoulders were still rocking half an hour later as the closing credits appeared on the screen.

And chin up, to be honest, was all you could have said to the Irish cricket team after that Roma-like thrashing by Australia.

"It was like a fourth division football side taking on Chelsea," said Sky's Michael Slater.

While Slater reckoned there was a charming romance to such a contest, Paul Allott, his fellow panellist, took no pleasure in watching cricket's Accrington Stanley "enjoy" the big stage. He suggested their presence in the latter stages of the competition "devalued" it.

"Aaaaw but," said Slater, "you gotta love what they stand for, you gotta love their passion, they are trying to squeeze every ounce of talent out of their amateur bodies."

Hear, hear! Any way, having beaten Pakistan, they can hardly be dismissed as puffballs who've never done it on the big occasion, can they?