Bias over balance is key to covering sport on the box

TV Watch with Dave O’Connell

Apocryphal though it may be, it is said that RTE’s legendary soccer commentator and self-professed Shamrock Rovers die-hard Philip Greene who once famously handed back to studio from a Milltown match with the line “and so it remains 1-0 to us”.

But even Philip, were he not gone to his eternal reward, could learn a thing or two from the Brits when it comes to parochialism – particularly when Wimbledon comes onto the horizon.

Honestly, you simply have to marvel at the way they build up half-hopers into title contenders and then discard them like an old towel.

The stock joke concerns Andy Murray’s nationality – British when he’s breaking the 77-year hoodoo like he was on Sunday, Scottish when he’s losing like he did a year earlier – but the hyperbole that the BBC threw at Laura Robson was more misguided than our bank deposits guarantee.

If she were from anywhere else, she’d have been another young hopeful with half an ounce of talent – instead, because she made it into the second week of Wimbledon by virtue of winning two matches, they wanted to rechristen the public viewing area nicknamed Murray Mound (aka Henman Hill) as Robson Green.

And when she made her inevitable exit before the serious stuff had even begun, she was quietly ushered through the exit door without another word being said about her.

Murray, on the other hand, was always a real contender, but his infamous scowl was well justified after his epic quarter-final triumph over the tough Spaniard, Fernando Verdasco.

BBC reporter Garry Richardson referred to the hairdryer treatment so famously deployed by former Manchester United manager and Wimbledon spectator Sir Alex Ferguson – and enquired whether Murray might need some tough love all of his own, or if he actually knew it all already.

As badly-phrased questions go, this was a Olympic class, but for once Murray resisted the urge to turn on his heels in disgust – perhaps baffled by the stupidity of the comment.

“I don’t know it all, far from it. But I don’t see why I should get told off after that. I tried incredibly hard, chased every single ball down from the first to the last and I came through an incredibly tough match,” he said – and then walked off, still shaking his head in disbelief.

And of course disbelief was in the air on a number of sporting fronts last week – indeed incredulity might be a better description to Warren Gatland’s decision to dispense with the services of Brian O’Driscoll on the other side of the world.

Coverage of the Lions tour doesn’t enjoy the same profile given that it’s ringfenced by Sky Sports – although Michael Corcoran’s commentaries on RTE Radio prove that passion paints better pictures than television ever could.

The quality of Sky’s analysis, on the other hand, left much to be desired – particularly when it came to Scott Quinnell, a man who is to analysis what Ian Paisley is to the Catholic Church.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Sentinel.