Britton shows her class and puts turkey on the table for Kiernan

TV VIEW:AH, SUNDAY rashers and runny eggs serenaded by the golden sporty strains of Amhrán na bhFiann, it doesn't get much better that. As Jerry Kiernan put it, "We're a small country, but we're constantly bringing home the bacon", and here we were again, this time Fionnuala Britton leaving all behind her at the European Cross-Country Championships.

And it all looked a bit effortless too, at least from the vantage point of a couch in a toasty warm room, like she was just going for a jog in the back garden.

Funnily enough Greg Allen told us that that’s what she did growing up, turned the kitchen lights on on a winter morning and ran around her Wicklow back garden 40 or 50 times. Like you do. “That’s one way of keeping the grass down in the winter,” said Kathryn Davis, although as Allen pointed out, so slight is Britton, it’s unlikely she made a significant impact on the lawn.

“She’s not going to win a medal in the Olympic Games, I know she’s made the steeplechase team but the barriers are almost as big as her,” said Kiernan before the race, so he reckoned this was her best hope, for now, of making her senior medal mark.

He was confident too that she could do it. “I think she has a reasonable chance of winning it,” he said, which left his companions on RTÉ, Peter Collins and Sonia OSullivan, half wishing he wouldn’t tempt fate in that fashion.

It was only, of course, yesterday that Catherina McKiernan triumphed in the same race – although some might be finicky and reject the classification of 1994 as “yesterday”, not least Fionnuala Britton who was only 10 at the time.

Ignore them and just savour two Irish successes in this event in the space of a couple of days, Britton somehow prevailing despite rejecting the expert advice from the couch that told her she was mad to be trying to lead from the front. Admittedly, it’s never easy leading from behind.

“She has made my Christmas,” beamed Kiernan, revealing that he had a “nice little investment in her”, although he failed to divulge the odds and the wager. Judging by the beam, though, there’ll be a turkey the size of an ostrich on his Christmas Day table.

“It’s goosebumps time,” he said when Slovenia treated us to a particularly rousing and tuneful rendition of Amhrán na bhFiann, enough to make the rashers and runny eggs weep.

“Welcome to the gold medal club,” O’Sullivan said to Britton when she came on the phone, the call to RTÉ blocking Alex Ferguson’s attempts to contact the runner to ask for tips on thriving in Europe.

And thriving, O’Sullivan noted, is what more than a couple of our sportswomen have been doing of late, noting that swimmer Gráinne Murphy, sailor Annalise Murphy and badminton player Chloe Magee had all qualified for the 2012 Olympics in the previous few days.

Murphy’s exploits at the World Sailing Championships in Australia, where she finished sixth overall, were very kindly brought to us by Sky Sports. But watching her do her thing on exceptionally choppy seas, even giving an interview while bopping up and down and down and up and back down again, only (a) made us marvel at her mettle and (b) made us grateful we hadn’t just dined on rashers and runny eggs.

That aside, it was a positively exceptional week for Irish sportswomen, somewhat in contrast to the Champions League fortunes of the Manchester clubs. Still, Fergie has won everything in the game, bar the Europa League. So, in that sense, the defeat to Basel was a triumph – he now has the chance to complete the deck.

And, if you watched Barcelona against Real Madrid on Saturday night, you’d have to conclude it’s no bad thing to be out of the Champions League. Truly, they’re something else.

The highlight of the night, though, wasn’t anything that happened on the pitch, it was Rafa Benitez back in the studio trying to sound disappointed for Jose Mourinho. “Sometimes it’s better to say nothing than to say something and try to be clever,” he said of his erstwhile nemesis, his funny little beard almost curling in delight.

Watching Sunderland v Blackburn yesterday? Well, while it was very lovely to see Martin O’Neill back Riverdancing on the touchline, the contrast with El Clasico was rather stark. As Pat Nevin put it on BBC Radio, “there are more hoofs here than at the Grand National . . . this game is summed up by Yakubu against Bramble. It’s like watching a David Attenborough documentary with two yaks banging into each other.”

Harsh, but he had a point.