TV View/Mary Hannigan: Bill O'Herlihy was feeling chipper. You could tell by the way he was merrily swinging about in his chair. Ireland had just beaten Georgia to get their Euro 2004 qualifying campaign "back on track" - but much, much more significantly, one half of his regular panel seemed quite pleased about it .

By then he'd already told Bill that "it's the first time for a very, very long time that I feel Ireland have the right manager and are going about their business in the right way". Later he conceded that "it's the first time for a very, very long time that I've really wanted Ireland to win."

"Hallelujah! Peace in our time!" a beaming Bill thought to himself, for the first time in a very, very long time.

Happy days ahead, then, everyone singing from the same hymn-sheet? "Altogether now - 'By a lonely prison wall, I heard a young girl ca-a-a-allin" Bill was about to encourage his panellists to croon. The problem was, of course, that he didn't notice the oncoming "but".

We could see, hear and smell it coming, but Bill was blinded by the light he spotted at the end of the tunnel marked "17 years of unremitting aggro between yer man and whoever happened to be managing the Republic of Ireland". Oblivious, he nigh on did wheelies around the studio on his chair .

But? Then the "but" came.

"But he's a bit of a fanny merchant in front of the cameras," said the panellist (not Johnny Giles, the other one), "talking about his great tactics and how he did this and how he did that."

At that moment Bill, his dreams lying in several pieces on the studio floor, knew exactly how Kofi Annan must feel. When he regained his composure he put in a word for Brian Kerr.

"Are you asking the questions or giving the answers," Eamon Dunphy replied.

"I'm simply reflecting what I read in the papers," said Bill.

"Well I don't give a damn about the papers," said Eamon. ("Yoo hoo," coughed Ireland on Sunday.)

Gilesie tried to calm the situation and half agreed that Kerr is fond of patting himself on the back, pointing to his post-match comments about reminding Gary Doherty, in an attempt to boost his confidence, that he had scored a couple of goals against Georgia at under-21 level. Giles, perhaps a little ruffled, thought telling Doherty he had "scored a couple of girls" wouldn't help, suggesting the man from Carndonagh wouldn't know the back of the net from a fine looking woman.

Giles was in solid form, though, even making a valiant attempt to dampen Bill's pre-match enthusiasm. Bill reckoned Ireland needed a minimum of four points from the games against Georgia and Albania so would therefore probably get them. "What you want to get, Bill, and what you actually get are two different things altogether," Gilesie reminded him. "Just because we need the points doesn't mean we're going to get them."

Gilesie quoting Jagger - "You can't always get what you want."? Wacky. Bill, we concluded, must have been a Beatles man in the 1960s because if he'd known the next line he could have sung it at Gilesie: "But if you try sometimes well you might find you get what you need." Which, when you think about it, is just what happened in Tbilisi.

The unfortunate aspect of the afternoon was, of course, the knife-throwing. "It was actually a pen-knife, a fairly small pen-knife," insisted Kerr, in a brave attempt at making a molehill out of a mountain.

"What can happen as a consequence of this?" asked Bill.

"We could send George Bush and Tony Blair in - maybe they could solve it," said Eamon.

"It'd take too long, Eamon," sighed Gilesie, who's still waiting to be shocked and awed.

The conversation then swung to Michael McCarthy. "There was always this thing with McCarthy, you didn't know what daft thing he was going to do or say next - it was volatile," said Dunphy, to which Bill and Gilesie said, to themselves: "Jaysus, Eamo: pot, kettle, black."

What Sammy McIlroy wouldn't have given for the "fanny merchant's" success on Saturday. When BBC Northern Ireland co-commentator Alan McDonald said that Armenia were "holding on by the skin of their fingertips" you knew there was trouble ahead. It came in the form of an Armenian winner four minutes from time.

Back in the studio, Stephen Watson and Billy Hamilton were crestfallen. Tommy Wright, though, didn't look too dejected. But, as Watson whispered, "Tommy Wright was in the toilet when Armenia scored". So, maybe he thought Sammy's boys had picked up a valuable point. Stephen and Billy hadn't the heart to break the bad news.