Following sport on television can be a joyless, exploitative pursuit, but this weekend was particularly sadistic.

On Saturday evening, the latest in a series of diverse BBC 2 Storyville documentaries featured a season with Melbourne Aussie Rules club, the Footscray Bulldogs. The "doggies" - as they are known to their fans - were, when we met them, slightly down on their luck.

"It's not that they lost, but the way they did - by 20, 30 points, okay, but by 87 points," marvelled a woebegone supporter after the first match.

It was to set the tone for a particularly grim 90 minutes. A week later, local rivals North Melbourne dismissed them by 131 points.

"What are you trying to do to this club," sobbed their coach, Alan Joyce, in a voice that was so blood-curdlingly uneven that you felt the next opposition would surely feel obliged to throw the game. Alan looked like Liverpool's (former) Roy Evans, and with this worrisome observation somehow bringing the fortunes of the remote and hapless Aussie club closer to home, you sat back and shared a season of their lives.

Ultimately, it emerged they were all fundamentally decent sorts, though perhaps not best suited to athletic careers. Danny, a cheerful and elaborately goateed young man, described the shocking run of injuries which had left him in plaster for most of the year.

"An' just when me leg was good, I had an accident in the bath and busted me thumb," he sighed. Well, it happens.

Danny's team-mates, including club veteran Wally, and Shaun, undergoing treatment for cancer, tried to keep the flag flying on the pitch, but to no avail. Alan, a broken man, begged to tender his resignation but the board refused. When they bestowed on him a vote of confidence, your heart skipped. It became clear that Footscray was the dumping ground for all the ill-luck in Victoria. Game footage suggested that most of the Footscray lads had a fairly tenuous appreciation of the catch and kick, vital attributes for any would-be Aussie Rules footballer.

They retired after each game to the strain of vicious abuse thrown by bitter, disillusioned fans who would have been happy for a losing season cloaked in some sense of professionalism (The unhappy comparisons with Liverpool FC lingered). Once it had you drawn in, the documentary really began to play hardball.

Footscray, not surprisingly, was also on the brink of financial anarchy. It was decided that Wally, "Plough" Wallace and the boys would have to participate in some sort of fundraiser. Not for them the traditional GAA method of £10 tickets for a giant panda or a turkey dinner for an even £100; no, the Footscray footballers deemed it more prudent to auction their boxer shorts - the enticement being that they would model said garments for the audience.

It offered the perfect balance really; ribald humiliation off the pitch as well as on it. It was when you saw the noble warriors of Footscray can-canning naked across the stage, their dignity cupped in their hands, that you realised that Storyville was not going to discover any redemption for these lost souls. It was a less sartorial equivalent of the infamous Liverpool FC white suits debacle on FA Cup final day of 1995.

Onwards we trundled, us Footscray fans. Come the last day of the season, come the miracle. Already down by loads at half-time, the lads seemed to respond to a fairly routine string of insults delivered by the (new) coach and had clawed their way back into the game by the last quarter. With seconds to go, a lad by the name of Watts made a mark and had a chance to end the season and documentary on an upbeat note.

"This is a big kick for Watts, 30 metres and straight," offered the commentator tersely. Funny how some guy from the Melbourne scrubs can affect your mood for the weekend.

" 'E f***in' missed it," whimpered Footscray president Peter Gordon seconds later. Footscray were forced into a merger last year and are now known as the Western Bulldogs. It is perhaps as well, for all concerned.

The Footscray saga provided a fitting footnote to a particularly taxing day for those given to the nuances of the oval ball. Ireland played rugby on Saturday. When you watch the Irish play rugby, there is always this sneaking suspicion that some of the players were the kids who never got picked in the soccer games after school or were formerly the gangly lads who repeatedly invoked the wrath of the PE teacher, and that they have exacted revenge by making us watch them play rugby.

Or maybe the malaise - which centres around a collective inability to catch the ball - is something which afflicts the entire Northern Hemisphere. Over in Murrayfield, the Scots, as Scott Hastings confirmed, were chirpily confident that they were coming good against the Afrikaners. Even late in the second half, his brother, Gavin, envisaged good things.

"If we can just score a try here . . . a break of the ball and away up the field . . . it would make a world of difference to this game," he said in that peculiar, nasal English accent all Scottish rugby lads (except John Jefferies) seem to affect.

Moments after his prediction, Duncan Hodge tried to chip over the South Africans, Rossouw charged down and trotted home for the try. Gavin was quiet.

At home, we were also quiet at the prospect of the Springboks coming over to, er, visit us.

In this age of shiny Celtic bonhomie, there is something reassuringly bleak about Irish rugby days. When the whole economic show comes crashing down around our arses and we are rowing about taxing kids' shoes again, at least Irish rugby can claim it never lost its integrity or inbred pessimism.

"If the Romanian backs had the Irish pack, they would have annihilated us," said Tony Ward. Perhaps it is time to twin with the good folk of Footscray.