TV VIEW:IT WAS Monaghan manager Seamus McEnaney who, last week, blamed the new experimental rules in Gaelic football for the loss of "manliness" in the game, prompting Paul Earley on Setanta on Saturday night to ask Seamus, and any one else brave enough to respond, to "define manliness".

You have, of course, to be cautious enough when rising to such a defining challenge. We actually checked our dictionary to see how it answered Paul’s question and it came up with two examples of the use of the word: “looking manly and capable in his tennis whites”, and “the manly art of knife-throwing”.

They aren’t, to be honest about it, the first examples we’d have chosen, and that’s not to doubt the red-blooded machismo of tennis whites or knife-chucking. But we’d probably have gone for something like “Setanta’s manly cameramen withstood the elements at Healy Park, Omagh for a couple of hours to bring us live coverage of the National League game between Tyrone and Galway”.

Seriously, military folk have shown less valour in the face of the enemy and still scooped the Victoria Cross, the Setanta team even managing to stay upright enough to capture a nigh on horizontal Liam Sammon on the sideline, the Galway manager almost lifted out of Omagh by the wind and deposited back in Knocknacarra.

“Rain of biblical proportions – and a gale force wind too,” as commentator Mike Finnerty put it, by then the Setanta cameras desperately in need of windscreen wipers, the players in need of snorkels.

Need it be said, we shared their pain as we turned the gas up another notch, our toasty warm hand reaching for the remote control to louden Mike’s words as the gale attempted to (literally) drown him out.

Coping with these elements, then, was, for us, the definition of manliness. Paul, though, failed to salute this valour at full-time, instead focusing purely on “good hard competitive tackling”, regardless of the conditions, as his interpretation of the word’s meaning. “And not clotheslining a fella?” asked our host, Daire O’Brien. “No,” said Paul, “clotheslining a fella isn’t manly”.

Wikipedia lists many disadvantages of the clothesline; one of them is: “Neighbours may find it aesthetically unpleasant.”

That left us confused. Did it mean that, say, Fermanagh (who, bless them, were described as “Monaghan” by the stadium announcer on more than one occasion at Páirc Uí Caoimh yesterday) didn’t find Ryan McMenamin’s style of play attractive? Or was Paul referring to the act of a player attempting to slice the head off an opponent, like when you run down the garden in pursuit of a butterfly and end up julienned by the clothesline?

Whatever, those Setanta camermen defined manliness for us, as opposed to their cosy cousins in Turin over the weekend, the ones who covered the European Indoor Championships. Indoors? Huh! Mary Cullen? Could she beat the mighty Anna Alminova? “Yes” insisted Eamon Coghlan on RTÉ on Saturday night. “No,” said Jerry Kiernan, “there’s not a chance she can beat Alminova, not a chance – there’s nobody in the field who will beat Alminova. Alminova, I think, is pretty much bomb-proof.”

But Mary beat Alminova. As did the two runners who finished ahead of the woman from Drumcliffe, Co Sligo, leaving her with a very lovely bronze medal. Alminova bombed, finishing sixth, although we only discovered that after the event. The cosy cameramen in Turin only showed an interest all afternoon in the front runners, as evidenced by the coverage of the 4 x 400 metres women’s final. Ireland were scrapping with Belarus for bronze, but all the focus was on the battle for gold, between Britain and . . . dunno, someone else.

We only found out that blasted Belarus beat us some time after the race. It’s at times like this that being an athletic afterthought makes you bristle, and makes you wish the Turin cameramen were treated to a night’s work in Healy Park, Omagh, just so they’d know how the other half live.

Less than a fortnight ago St Mirren knew how the other half lived – not all that well – when Celtic beat them 7-0 in the league. Saturday? The teams met again in the cup, and oh how we feared for St Mirren’s safety. Full-time? “You have to go back to April 1990 – the month of the Strangeways Prison riots and the launch of the Hubble telescope – for the last time St Mirren beat Celtic,” said the Sky man, as St Mirren celebrated beating Celtic and Gordon Strachan wore the look of a man who was about to use his players as target practice for the manly art of knife-throwing. A clotheslining defeat that Celtic’s Glasgow neighbours might have found aesthetically pleasant.