TV VIEWWHATEVER ABOUT God, you'd imagine Zorro doesn't put in an appearance all that often in Milton Keynes, except maybe at the Multiplex, but when Munster come to town you just never know who they'll bring with them.
It was Sky Sports’ Mark Robson who noted both the divine presence, in the form of Ronan O’Gara’s boot, and the mark of Zorro, in the shape of Simon Zebo’s hat-trick.
He most probably added Superman O’Connell to his collection, but, in those closing stages, Will Greenwood’s bellowing would have drowned him out entirely.
Greenwood certainly hadn’t anticipated what he ended up witnessing, describing this Munster side as the worst to ever go five out of five in their Heineken Cup pool, but by the end of Saturday’s tussle with Northampton he was bowing in a ‘we’re not worthy’ kind of way. It was quite a turnaround.
O’Gara was the focus of much of the Sky pair’s admiration, Robson even pointing out to us, when the camera picked out ‘ROG’ embossed on his boots, that “That’s just one letter short of God backwards”.
The ‘ROG-almost-equals-God- backwards’ equation silenced Greenwood, briefly, our co-commentator kind enough not to point out that you could say the same about bog, fog, cog and hog, to name but a few, but Robson filled the gap by declaring, when O’Gara put over another penalty, that he was “kicking like God today!”
“And sometimes you just want to ruffle his hair and shove his face in the mud because HE KEEPS DOING IT TO YOU,” he, well, bellowed as O’Gara came off near the end, job done.
Zebo came in for almost as much love, and that was even before he completed his hat-trick. “I think he made the mark of Zorro there, and he’s been as clinical as Zorro himself today, has the winger,” said Robson after his second try, upping his praise a notch after his third when he conceded “he’s sharper than Zorro, is Zebo”.
Come full-time Paul Wallace was purring, although a little shamefacedly, having described Munster before the game as a “no frills” kind of team.
“I’m due a trip to the confessional,” he said, his head bowed, having seen more frills in that second half than he’d witnessed since Zorro was a boy.
Just the 87 points, then, in the encounter, a bit of a scoring contrast to what Gary ‘to be honest with ya’ Neville forecast for the meeting of Manchester City and Spurs yesterday. “I think one goal will decide this game,” he said after a scoreless first half, and with that came a Munster-esque avalanche of conversions.
Apart from that, though, Neville turned in a rather sterling performance alongside his comrade Graeme Souness, to the point where you wonder if Sky will now be tempted to put Jamie Redknapp out to pasture.
We might be used to feisty footballing opinions on Irish telly, but for Sky this is whole new ball game.
“Howard Webb has seen that and has chosen to let it go,” he, well, alleged after Mario Balotelli’s stamp on Scott Parker went unpunished by the referee, a charge that would have had him up in front of the FA during his playing days. But, now that he’s retired, there’s no stopping the fella. He’s warming to his punditry task.
“He’s a car crash waiting to happen,” Souness said of Balotelli, a nodding Neville at a loss to understand why he had selected Parker as his victim. “You could understand it if it was me,” he grinned, prompting every watching Manchester City, Liverpool, Arsenal (etc, etc, etc) fan to applaud enthusiastically.
And then there was his assessment of Andrei Arshavin’s contribution to footballing life in England:
“You never criticise other players . . . but . . . he looks the most disinterested player in the league to me . . . he doesn’t want to be here . . . he don’t like London, he don’t like England, he thinks our women are ugly . . . I think he wants to go back to Russia. Well, go back!”
In fairness to the beleaguered Arshavin, who seems marginally less popular with Arsenal fans than Neville (and that’s saying a great deal), a very speedy scan of the archives didn’t produce any comments by him alleging English women were ugly – his chief focus to date has been the ugliness of women’s driving – “We need to build new roads for women. If you see a car behaving weirdly, swerving and doing strange things, before you see the driver you know it is a woman. It is always a woman.”
This could all lead to the wackiest of slander trials. Ugly English Women: Neville v Arshavin. You’d pay in for that one. Even Gooners, you suspect, would be on Nev’s side.
Judging by yesterday, they’d quite like him to go back to Russia too.
