TV VIEW:GO ON, own up, how many of you reckoned Joseph O'Brien had timed his Derby charge on Camelot entirely wrong, that he'd left it way too late and that Main Sequence would hold on and . . . whoooooooosh. Winner: Camelot.

It’s at times like that you realise you’re even more horsie-clueless than you had previously conceded. And that, possibly, Joseph and his Da know a little more about these charge-timing horsey things than yourself.

But the world of equine racing remains a baffling thing for us uninitiated types.

Last week, for example, trainer Ger Lyons was having a chat with Robert Hall at the Curragh about his horse The Reaper. “We sent him to Dubai this winter and it turned him in to a man,” he said, which sounded to us like a bad thing for a horse, unless centaurs are exceptionally speedy creatures.

Robert and Ted Walsh just nodded, though, in appreciation, without ever asking what exactly The Reaper got up to in Dubai that turned him to a man.

With a nod to Las Vegas, what happens in Dubai stays in Dubai, it seems. Even for four-legged party animals.

And then on Saturday, John Best’s Stone of Folca – a 50-1 chance, for heaven’s sake – won the Investec Specialist Bank ‘Dash’ at Epsom, as if we even know what that means.

An emotional John spoke to the BBC crew after the dash, paying tribute to Stone of Folca by saying “his brain hasn’t always been in the right place . . . mentally he’s not very good. Getting him out on to the track is just a nightmare, it’s like dealing with an untamed lion.” As tributes go, it wasn’t the warmest, although, in fairness, Stone of Folca could be seen over John’s shoulder chewing a gazelle in the winner’s enclosure.

Back to Joseph and he was predictably cocky as Rishi Persad thrust his microphone in his face as he trotted towards the winner’s enclosure where a carcass of a gazelle now lay.

“He’s a very special horse, I’m just very fortunate to be on his back, and I owe big thanks to . . .” said Joseph, going on to list a plethora of people who’d done everything from purchasing Camelot to serving him breakfast.

A highly impressive young man, his modesty and gratitude things of loveliness. “Are you listening, Pat Spillane,” Joe Brolly might say.

Pat: “I went on Wikipedia to find out what I scored in championship football. I think I scored, I’m not too sure, 13 goals and 150 points. The point I’m trying to make, the bottom line . . .” Joe: “The bottom line, Pat, is that you’re great.”

Yes, RTÉ paired Pat and Joe for the Longford v Wexford game yesterday, a bit like pairing Liam Neeson with the Late Late Show’s green room. Risky.

For the second week running the issue that dominated the chat was the excessive use of handpassing and how it’s utterly banjaxing Gaelic football and making it a touch unattractive as a sporting spectacle.

And Pat came armed with stats to prove his point. Heavily armed. “The 1976 All-Ireland had 111 handpasses, last year’s final had 285, this year’s Division Two League final between Kildare and Tyrone had 345.

“Compare that to kick passes – the number of kick passes in the 1976 final between Kerry and Dublin was 198, there were 114 in last year’s final, 88 in this year’s Division Two League final – Tyrone only kicked it 27 times in 74 minutes.”

By the time Pat was done Joe was suggesting that he should attempt to acquire a life, while Michael Lyster was sporting the look of a man who wished he was in a green room, any green room at all, with Liam Neeson.

And that was before cone-gate. “You’d have thought they were playing a giant game of Battleship – there must be 140 of them,” said Joe as he watched Longford warm up by zig-zagging through an entire field of cones.

“And do you know what the Longford players are throwing up in the air,” asked Pat. “Medicine balls! It’s loo-la!” “Fellas went in to battle,” he alleged, “armed with less equipment.” Certainly with fewer cones. The way to improve Gaelic football, a chap told him recently, was to “burn all the cones in Ireland”.

The antagonism towards cones was, perhaps, a little excessive, Pat wearing the look of an untamed lion chewing on a gazelle as he emoted on the subject. According to Wikipedia, a cone is merely a basic geometrical shape.

And not to blame, at all, for the demise of Gaelic football as a sporting spectacle.