SIDELINE CUT: The feeding frenzy carried out by RTÉ's trio of panellists last Sunday on Donegal's performance was lacking in both taste and personal recall

SO IF and when Pat Spillane or Joe Brolly or Colm O’Rourke or any of the voices of Establishment happen to bump into Jim McGuinness at some of the velvet-tie functions this autumn, will they have the good grace to apologise to him? Doubtful.

But that doesn’t make the comments emanating from RTÉ on Sunday afternoon and Sunday evening any less disgraceful or insulting – not just to McGuinness but to the entire squad and, by extension, to the county.

The tone of disparagement set by Spillane after Donegal’s championship opening-day victory over Antrim overflowed into naked contempt following their 0-8 to 0-6 All-Ireland semi-final loss to Dublin on Sunday night. In slagging McGuinness and the Donegal side off, the afternoon panellists positioned themselves as aesthetes, brimming with concern about the image of the game.

Funny, that. Maybe weird things happen to the memory when you enter the powder room at Montrose and get dolled up for the cameras.

But it might be worth recalling the reality of Gaelic football when they were playing the game. In 1987, Paddy Downey, the doyen of Gaelic games coverage, penned an article predicting that the upcoming All-Ireland final between the Meath team of Colm O’Rourke’s vintage and Cork would be every bit as ugly as the 1967 showdown between the counties, which was remembered chiefly for providing the statistic of 51 frees in 60 minutes.

“The final of 20 years ago is far from the minds of the two squads of players who prepare for Sunday’s encounter,” Downey wrote. “Nor is either side concerned with critics’ comments over the standard of the 1987 championship, nor the special pleading that they are obliged to redeem the game’s tarnished image.”

That year’s final marked the beginning of a four-year rivalry, in which the Meath and Cork players habitually assaulted each other in a series of games which saw private hatreds played out in a public arena. It was a dark and ugly rivalry. Both teams were ravenous for success and would stop at nothing to get it: this was the period of liberation just after the demise of the great Kerry team.

Two years earlier, Kerry and Monaghan met in the 1985 All-Ireland semi-final. Pat Spillane played that day. It was a novel pairing and yet it attracted a crowd of just 21,746 people.

Isn’t it peculiar now to think that here were the gods of the modern game playing brand new Ulster champions and nobody was bothered going? Maybe it was because they remembered the 1979 semi-final between the teams, when poor old Monaghan shipped a 5-14 to 0-7 hammering against the Kingdom (But the Monaghan men played in the spirit of the game!).

It has to be presumed that most of the attendance came from Kavanagh country in 1985. Nobody from Kerry or no neutrals could be bothered to go and see the greats, Pat! If the game that Spillane and Kerry espoused was so irresistible, then how come they weren’t pouring through the turnstiles?

The answer, surely, is that by then, everyone was sick of Kerry; sick of their winning, sick of seeing the same old faces and listening to the same old schtick. Watching the same team win becomes monotonous. All those Kerry versus Dublin games – the Kingdom and the Power – was fine if you came from those two counties. But it didn’t do much for Gaelic football around the country.

In the 1990s came the Ulster resurgence. Joe Brolly played on a tough and talented Derry team, whose lone All-Ireland success in 1993 revolved around that year’s Ulster final against Donegal, the All-Ireland champions of the previous year. The teams disliked one another and it was a horrible game. And yes, it was played in a torrential downpour but you could have played it in Hawaii and the atmosphere would still have been poisonous.

You remember it, Joe. You remember the score. Look away because the sight of it might offend you these days. It was 0-8 to 0-6, the same as the score last Sunday. Did you worry about the entertainment value or the romance of the game that night Joe? Doubtful.

So back to Dublin and Donegal last Sunday. Dublin’s big misfortune was the sending off of Diarmuid Connolly and the incident was replayed and analysed at length.

Donegal's big misfortune was losing Karl Lacey. The Four Masters man is Donegal's most important player. It was notable that Barry Cahill's late 32nd-minute hit on Lacey was not replayed on the Sunday Game.It was notable that during the live broadcast, commentator Ger Canning and analyst Kevin McStay seemed determined to talk about anything other than the challenge as Lacey lay flat on his back.

It was interesting also that RTÉ made prominent use of a statistics icon noting (with due incredulity) the number of handpasses Donegal used in comparison to Dublin. And on the handpass issue, three of the Kerry goals in the celebrated Dublin-Kerry 1978 All-Ireland final were scored with the hands. It must make Pat Spillane ill to think about them now, given his aversion to that passing method.

And it was interesting that several of the frees Dublin were awarded were described on television as “handy”. Does that mean that the referee whistled a few soft ones? If so, why not come out and say it? For there seemed to be no shyness about calling the Donegal team and tactics exactly as they saw it and the studio stars used language that must have stung the ears of those watching up in the Inishowen Peninsula.

The weird thing is that Spillane, O'Rourke and Brolly seemed sort of . . . aroused after the match. What other match has provoked the Kerry man to reference Marlon Brando and Apocalyspe Now? Distasteful as they found the spectacle, it moved them to the use of flamboyant and excited language.

Maybe that was why Spillane felt emboldened enough to use terms like “Shi’ite football” and to bring in The Hague and war crimes. How they must have laughed out in Srebrenica at that one. You can imagine the reaction if a term like that was ever applied to an establishment GAA county like Dublin, Kerry or Cork or to the hurling strongholds of Kilkenny or Tipperary. There would be outrage. But a nothing county like Donegal –“up there” as it is often referred to – can shut up and take it. God knows what they would have said if Donegal had dared to actually win the game.

If Spillane and the others are going to take the grand-a-twist or whatever the Sunday Game fee is nowadays, they have to be more aware of their influence. So too should their employers.

They have to be aware of just how stinging those comments sound to the television licence-holders watching televisions in the bars of Glenties or Kilcar. They need to be aware of the weight of their reputations and of the weight that their words carry; they set the tone for the hysterical lynching that followed in the days afterwards.

There are people in Donegal dismayed by the way the team played against Dublin and who would dearly wish that the players might have expressed themselves a bit more openly when they game was in the balance.

However, they were entitled to set up that way. In most other field games in the world, from association football to baseball, the clean sheet or the shut-out is an acceptable – and lauded element – of the game. The Donegal team was guilty of nothing more than failing to enhance a clever and ferociously tough defensive strategy with a bit more attacking imagination.

They committed 22 fouls in the game – handy ones included. They scored two fewer points than Dublin. That was it. That failure did not merit the hostility and disdain which dripped from the state broadcaster on Sunday evening.

Anyhow, the Establishment has the All-Ireland final that it craved. The Kingdom and the Power, Alive-Alive-Oh and all of that. Meantime, the television stars might want to consider how they throw their words around.

If they do meet McGuinness and have the courage to look him in the eye, they will probably find the Glenties man will give them all the time in the world. They might learn from him something about that phrase which they like to confer on the gilded sons from the Establishment counties in the Montrose studio.

A bit of? What is it again? Oh, yeah.

Class.