Cram left speechless as Spillane finds the right words for Brolly

TV VIEW:THAT WAS a lively week. A speedy one too, with Steve Cram waving a white flag, conceding he could find no more words to describe the feats of you know who. He should have spoken to Gordon Strachan, who famously responded to a reporter's request for "a quick word" with: "Velocity".

That’s probably what Mr and Mrs Bolt should have named their son, but Usain it is. “I was trying, I was dying, my form was kind of going backwards, I wasn’t running upright, so it wasn’t a good race,” he told the BBC after breaking the 200m world record. That drew a chuckle from Michael Johnson who wondered what the fella might achieve if he was in good shape. Or, indeed, if he had the wind at his back.

“19.2 – you’ve GOT to be kidding me,” Cram had howled, nigh on falling out of his Berlin commentary box. “You know what,” he updated us, somewhat breathlessly, “it’s not 19.2, it’s 19.19 . . . in to a slight head wind.”

Our thoughts were with Steve Mullings who broke 20 seconds and only finished fifth. It’s not all that long ago that they would have been building statues of him in Jamaica for producing a time like that. Now he’s Timmy the Tortoise.

Johnson concluded that the man who will beat Bolt’s records “hasn’t been born yet”, but Colm O’Rourke might beg to differ, noting at Croke Park yesterday that Cork’s Pearse O’Neill “was like Forrest Gump, he was a runaway train, he’ll be going through Mallow around 6.15”.

That’s speedy enough.

Pat Spillane was mightily relieved that Cork prevailed, so incensed was he by the sending off of Alan O’Connor in the first half. “He’d get 10 out of 10 in the Olympic diving competition, he codded the referee,” he said of Owen Mulligan’s part in the incident, suggesting the Tyrone man had fallen as easily as Australian wickets at The Oval yesterday.

“Justice was done,” said Spillane at full-time, “Cork out-Tyroned Tyrone at Tyrone’s own game”. And, he added, throwing a glance in Joe Brolly’s direction, “don’t give me any more crap about team of the decade”.

It wasn’t the first time Joe and Pat had clashed yesterday, having had an earlier run-in on the subject of big words. “It summed up their insouciance,” said Joe of the Armagh minor team’s attack. “Their what, Joe?” Pat had inquired. “I thought you were the Socrates of the GAA,” said Joe.

“If you can’t convince, confuse,” Pat replied, with Colm stuck in the middle like a man watching a tennis rally.

“Can I use a big word?” Pat asked later.

“You can,” said Michael Lyster.

“Conundrum,” he declared, triumphantly.

“It’s not really that big Pat, that was an anti-climax,” said Joe.

At that point Michael should really have sent the pair in to the naughty corner of the studio, until they calmed down and promised to be good, but in fairness, order was soon restored (apart from when Pat said “I never thought as a Kerry man that I’d be so full of admiration for Cork”, prompting Joe to suggest that this was because of Pat’s “hatred of the North and all things northern”. Other than that they were the best of buddies.)

The big word of the week, though, wasn’t insouciance or conundrum, it was “discretion” which, with an impossibly straight face, is how Nick Davies, spokesman for the International Association of Athletics Federations, told the BBC the body was dealing with the case of South African runner Caster Semenya.

“There have been rumours and suspicions about this athlete for a number of weeks . . . so if you’re going to start saying ‘you’re not a woman, you’re a man’, you really have to be sure of what you’re doing,” he proclaimed. Indeed.

“Absolutely unbelievable,” was how the BBC’s Brendan Foster generously chose to describe the handling of the matter, reminding the IAAF that “there are two things here – one is about sport, the other is about Caster Semenya’s life in South Africa”. But, one suspects, it would come as a shock to the IAAF to learn that Semenya has a life outside powering around a track.

“So, essentially, they’re acting on rumours and suspicions?” asked John Inverdale of athletics’ own Keystone Cops, a notion that brought a smile from Denise Lewis. If that was the path they followed in every case most of the leading names in athletics would disappear behind clouds of suspicion. As is often the case it was Johnson who nailed it. “We have had so many athletes who have doped we know that people will cheat for success, so you HAVE to look at this case – but how the IAAF is dealing with it is just ALL wrong.”

In terms of getting it hopelessly wrong, it was on a par with Ricky Ponting reckoning he could make that run at The Oval yesterday. Ultimately, it left Australia’s hopes in Ashes. A bit like the IAAF’s reputation for handling matters with “discretion”.