TV View: The GAA ought to extend the half-time break in hurling finals. There simply isn't enough time to allow Ger Loughnane to say what he needs to say. Loughnane talks at twice the speed of normal pundits. Man alive, the flow of hurling wisdoms and tactical verities is simply awesome.

You may well have noticed this before but Loughnane speaks the way the game of hurling is played.

He is unbridled and passionate. He is frenetic, flowing, idiosyncratic and he refuses to take prisoners. Loughnane doesn't like giving ground and when he starts to make a point he tends to take the scenic route and, as he stops at various points of interest, he gives the impression that his views are inviolable.

This is called Loughnane infallibility. He should be robed in a white smock and handed a crosier.

With all the nervous static and barely contained energy that he brings to an All-Ireland panel, it's the stare, however, that can be a little unnerving.

There is also something feral about Loughnane, something elemental as he sits in the RTÉ studio alongside presenter Michael Lyster and hurling analyst Cyril Farrell, poised as if he is actually holding himself from springing out of the chair.

Lyster sits opposite hunched towards his guest, hoping for a gap in the patter. But it never comes.

On a weekend of European soccer and All-Ireland finals, hurling is the game that brings you home, the sport that manages to celebrate, among many things, humility and ordinariness, paradoxically with over 80,000 people cheering it on.

Loughnane articulates that in an engaging and authentic way and combined with his own edgy character, it's quite a package.

RTÉ seeks the common touch and finds it. The shot of the bearded hill farmer just down for the day. The mammy with the sandwiches. The girls glammed up and braided in their teams colours. Inescapably they are locals from some corner of this island.

The feel is that Henry Shefflin could be your neighbour, Pat Mulcahy the guy behind you in the coffee queue.

When Ger Canning reels off the names of the players, they are people we could know and talk to.

George Hamilton, with occasionally exquisite German, was doing the same thing in Stuttgart on Saturday night.

It was entirely different.

The Keanes and Duffs, the Ballacks and Fringses present themselves like expensive products.

Nothing like a pre-match boot row to hammer home that. Packaged by clubs, protected by agents, pampered by image-makers and likely to be owned by an oligarch, injured they limp off, have a scan and recover in Barbados.

They don't have to turn up for duty in the local Garda station the next day with a broken thumb or a torn hamstring.

"It's the type of game I love," enthused Loughnane of the hurling at the break as Kilkenny led by three points.

"Bruising, physical, smothering," he fizzed. A one man show.

But the difficulties with a panel of experts arrive when there isn't much analysing to be done and when they largely agree. It's a little like asking three people to try a fried bull's testicle. Two spit the food out and the other vomits.

That's a pretty concise judgment and what more is there to say.

You don't really need to ask the person who throws up whether the texture was all right before he gagged. You don't then turn to the other two and ask them what was so good about the flavour that it didn't make them sick.

And so we turn to Dunphy, Brady and Giles, three men you can trust to speak their mind. Real men, who like Loughnane and "They Should Dig Up Croke Park" Farrell, are unafraid to gag on air all over Bill Herlihy's studio.

Dunphy was the one throwing up, Ireland's performance being the pan-fried cojonas.

For him, the performance against Germany in their European Championship qualifying match was indigestible.

"It was a shambles," said Dunphy, dismissively, before subjecting Giles to an impromptu rapid-fire inquisition.

"Where was Reid playing? What was Kilbane doing? What position was Duff playing? And the behaviour of the manager was pretty depressing," added the polemicist.

"He's got a job to be doing. Not kicking bottles into the air and ripping off his accreditation," he said.

Giles, with his ever present ability to say the most obvious things and sort of make it work for him, politely answered all of Dunphy's demands.

Giles is not one to get riled even when his mate is flirting with belligerence.

"This was one hundred times, one thousand times better than Holland," observed Giles about a side for which expectations are now so low that when humiliation is narrowly avoided, the corks are popped.

Brady then came in.

"Depressing, yeah that's a word I'd use," he said on a night that the only Steve to be was the England boss, McClaren.