TV VIEW:WE WERE trying to remember on Saturday the last time we heard a New Zealand coach of Wales speaking in Irish to an English interviewer in Dublin about being called a "menopausal warthog". It just won't come to us, but it was hardly a first?

It was the BBC’s Sonia McLoughlin who asked Warren Gatland how he felt about this “quite personal” criticism from “some sections of the Irish media”, prompting the coach to clear his throat and declare: “Aithníonn ciaróg ciaróg eile”.

Sonia, we sensed, was about to call an ambulance for Gatland because, in Kiwi, “Aithníonn ciaróg ciaróg eile” made it sound like he was having trouble breathing, but instead she simply asked for a translation.

“It takes one cockroach to know another,” he explained, to which she said “oh”.

Back in studio, Gabby Logan and Jonathan Davies exchanged discombobulated glances, while Keith Wood just chuckled a little.

Davies, while intimating that he wouldn’t know a ciaróg even if he danced with one in a Llanelli nightclub, expressed some displeasure at Gatland’s feuding with his former pals, citing Declan Kidney as an example of how to conduct oneself in the build-up to a game.

“Wales are the only team Ireland haven’t beaten here at Croke Park – how big a motivation is that today,” Sonia had asked Kidney.

“Well, it just heightens our bloodlust and desire to beat the menopausal warthog’s poor excuse for a rugby team,” old twinkly eyes didn’t say, instead opting to whisper: “Well, it’s a little statistic, isn’t it”.

“None of his answers equates to any of the questions he’s been asked,” Wood chuckled again, “he just knows what he wants to say before the game – which is nothing, really.”

“We laugh about him all the time,” said Davies, “as he’s coming on we think: what’s he not going to say today?”

What he did say, though, losing the run of himself yet again, was that Brian O’Driscoll was a decent rugby player. That was a nice tribute, but nicer still was Wood’s earliest brush with the centurion.

“I remember when he first came in to the squad, a little spotty, bespeckled guy, a bit geeky, and you thought, ‘this guy can’t be of any value on a rugby field’. And then there was the first training session and it was ‘wow – this guy is truly extraordinary’.”

Over on RTÉ they were lauding O’Driscoll too. George Hook recalled that “it hasn’t been all sweeteness and light – he wasn’t a natural captain . . . he struggled with the social and commercial pressures of being a superstar . . .”

“Jesus wept,” Brent Pope and Conor O’Shea were about to roar when George conceded “he has proved himself to be a warrior, a man and a captain and possibly the greatest centre I’ve ever seen”. Grand.

There was no agreement, though, on the subject of Andy Powell, the Welsh player who drove a golf buggy up the M4 early in the morning while a touch inebriated. Conor reckoned he deserved his axing from the squad, but George had pity for the fella, reminding us that a cocktail of testosterone and beer can cause lads to do all kinds of mad things.

“Willie John McBride has made a career out of regaling us with all the hotels they burnt down and all the police forces they thumped,” he said, wondering why golf buggy-gate hadn’t earned Andy similar veneration.

It’s not that George has any time for Andy as a player: he’d described him as an “illiterate in rugby terms”.

“He should have been dropped because he’s a crap backrow, but he shouldn’t have been dropped because he’s a crap buggy driver.”

Match time. Wales had trouble steering their golf buggy. “I don’t know what to say really,” sighed Davies back on the BBC, dejection getting the better of him.

George was lost for words too. The old ones, eh? “The lady with excessive avoirdupois is not singing yet lads, this isn’t over,” he said.

Brent begged to differ. “She’s on the bus on her way in to town,” he said of the portly crooner.

“You were absolutely everywhere today,” Tracy Piggott said to man-of-the-match Tomás O’Leary.

“I dunno, thanks anyway,” he bragged, as boastful a speciman as his coach.

“I can’t remember a performance from a Welsh team that was as poor as that,” said Matt Williams on Setanta later.

“I think only the Queen Mary could accommodate more passengers,” agreed Neil Francis in his tribute to the Welsh pack.

Kidney’s verdict? “Let the menopausal Kiwi warthog take his ciarógs back to Wales.”

Na. “Ah yeah, it was grand.” T’was too.