WELL it was the biggest weekend in Irish sport for some weeks and RTE had come prepared. The greatest partnership in team sports punditry was in place and ready for the big game. Yup, when it comes to Australian football you just can't beat Peter Landy and Peter McKenna.

This week the pair guided us through the action between Essendon Bombers and Sydney Swans - an important clash for the Bombers apparently for they needed a win to edge their way towards the play-offs. By the time the pair finished with us, the only question we still couldn't answer about this game was how exactly it managed to make it onto any television screens around this side of the world?

Granted the game, for good reason, bears a more than passing resemblance to Gaelic football and just about everybody who plays it seems, on the strength of this contest at least, has an Irish name. But is that any reason to fill a chunk of Sports Stadium with it?

The powers-that-be in RTE's sports department are on record in relation to the coverage of local minority sports that it is not up to the station to "create" a demand for any particular sport. It would be nice therefore to hear what the explanation for the AFL's regular slot is.

Maybe, though, they'd just be disarmingly frank and tell us that the 20-minute weekly package simply costs less than the average camera-crew's lunch allowance.

Later in the afternoon the realm reunion occurred. Eamon Dunphy, was back from the wilderness having found a softer, more-loving side than we had ever been treated to before. Gone is the demon Jack and, even if his man didn't get to replace the departing manager (in fact, his man was sitting next to him in the studio), Dunphy was clearly coping a great deal better with the new regime.

The first outing of his return was flawless from the Dunphy's perspective with his refusal to be over-shadowed by John Giles's always more impressive hair-do and his ability to pronounce Inchicore finest's surname giving him a considerable advantage over his fellows panelists.

If the programme planners had fluffed anything upon his return, it was the lack of time afforded the three to expand on what had seemed a highly promising discussion on the overall tactical direction of the Irish team under Mick McCarthy.

"We'll have to leave that there, and go to a break," cut in Bill O'Herlihy just as Dunphy turned to Joe Kinnear and asked the only self-confessed advocate of the 3-5-2 formation present, "what about the wing backs Joe?" My dad, he prefers Paddy Crerand but, when it comes to football, I'm a Dunphy man me self.

Over on the BBC, meanwhile, Jimmy Hill was to be seen earlier on Saturday appearing on Football Focus. The man with the most famous chin in football was having no more success than those who had gone before in making Gary Lineker look at home in the programme bizarre new setting.

He was, on the other hand, ably demonstrating just how football punditry should not be practiced, by mounting a spirited but rather ill-conceived defence of the recently-departed Manchester City Alan Ball.

It was the fans, said Hill, who had forced Ball to depart before he had really had the chance to show what he was capable of achieving at Maine Road.

What he then pondered, would have happened if Manchester United's supporters had been so terribly impatient with a certain Mr Ferguson when, after a couple of years at the club, he had failed to deliver the expected level of success?

Jimmy, of course, does this for a living, so it seems fair to assume that he knows that Ferguson, even in his quieter period at Old Trafford, never actually managed to bring them down a division. There is also the trifling matter of their records. Ferguson had tasted an improbable amount of success during his days at Aberdeen. For Ball, City was something of a return to form after bringing Southampton to the dizzy heights of mid-table in the Premiership.

He had been relegated with every other club he had led and even his old pal Lee must have been eyeing the two remaining lower divisions with growing alarm when they lost a couple of this season's openers.

Whether Hill's loyalty to the small and squawkey extends to allowing him to take the reigns at Craven Cottage remains to be seen.