Almost cricket as Gooch polishes off the Cork tail

TV View: "How can you tell your wife you are just popping out to play a match and then not come back for five days?" asked Liverpool manager Rafa Benitez recently, admitting that when it came to cricket he just didn't get it. Not the appeal of it, not the length of it, not the rules of it, nothing. Baffled.

The Spaniard, of course, isn't alone. Often an admission of a bit of a weakness for the sport and an eagerness to discuss the batting averages of England's middle order is greeted by a response along the lines of: "Is that the time? Gotta go.

"(Weirdo)."

There are many who regard the sport as a sure-fire cure for insomnia, but those who've taken in the current Ashes series will know that the only ones really snoozing have been Australia's upper batting order.

"I'll edge towards this being the most exciting thing I've ever seen," said Richie Benaud of the series on Saturday, and when Richie's that excited you can be sure it's all positively electrifying. Which it has been.

Richie has never been one to rush in to making statements of that magnitude.

Indeed possibly the only time in his commentating career that he spoke without having a really good think in advance was the day he said: "The slow-motion replay doesn't show how fast the ball was really travelling."

The complaint about cricket has always been that nothing much ever happens, but the people doing the complaining mustn't realise that Geoff Boycott doesn't play any more, he's in the Channel Four commentary box these days.

So much has been happening in this series that if you popped out to make a cup of tea Australia would have lost eight wickets by the time you returned, with Shane Warne and Brett Lee the only ones showing any resistance.

He might not have the build of a finely tuned athlete, he might be gleefully snapped by the British tabloids on occasion with a fag hanging out of his mouth, he might attend the same barber as Tyrone's Owen Mulligan, but if there's more compulsive sporting viewing than Warne with a bat or ball in his hands this couch is damned if it can think of it. And he's meant to be yesterday's man.

For a while yesterday there was a whiff of a chance that Warne, with a helping hand from Lee, was about to do unto England what Ian Botham did unto the Aussies all those years back - a Supermanly Roy of the Riveting Rovers type performance - but in the end it wasn't to be.

Matthew Hoggard, who, incidentally, goes to the same barber as Warne and Mulligan, produced a bit of Supermanly resistance himself.

Marvellous stuff.

"If this was a cricket match Cork would be asked to follow on," said Michael Lyster at half-time at Croke Park yesterday. See? Cricket? It's even wormed its way into GAA HQ.

In the end Kerry beat Cork by an innings, much as Colm O'Rourke anticipated before the second half, as Billy Morgan's men emerged from the tunnel. "They're coming out like fellas going to an execution - their own execution," he said.

Cork's chief executioner was Gooch, who, interestingly, used to open the batting for England before switching to the hair-loss-remedy industry.

"Somebody should check his birth cert because I don't think he was born, I think he's a creation of God," said O'Rourke of Gooch.

"He's only 22," said Lyster. "Is that all he is?" gasped Joe Brolly. "God have mercy on all our souls."

On Saturday Tyrone scraped past Dublin, winning by just the seven points, which means we have an all-Ulster semi-final.

Bad news for Joe Rooney, a guest on RTÉ's Park Live yesterday morning. When told that "Northerners" were being targeted by Croke Park car-clampers he expressed unbridled delight.

"The Northerners come down on the M1 and us Meath people are just trying to drive along under the speed limit in our ****** (unmentionable brand name) cars, which can't even reach the speed limit, and they fly by us in their flash cars, waving at us and giving us the fingers with their big, arrogant Joe Brolly heads on them and their big yellow regs - the yellow reg, it's like a baboon flashing his big purple arse at ya, it's just arrogance.

"I hope when they arrive they get clamped, and they get three-man-tackle clamped, with all their feckin' tactics and all that."

Rooney, we take it, will be rooting for Kerry then. The Tyrone and Armagh middle orders look handy enough to us, but you'd have to imagine that that Gooch lad will hit them for at least six. God have mercy on their souls.