TG4 uniquely placed for arrival of teenage sensation

TV VIEW: So, is this the new Pele? Or Maradona? Or a combination of both, plus Cruyff and Best and Christy Ring and Mick O'Connell and Muhammad Ali and Carl Lewis and Don Bradman and Ian Thorpe and Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods? The sporting saviour of the universe? Or are we getting a little bit carried away? Immersed in a sea of hype? Maybe. Maybe not.

But you have to wonder, will all these flattering comparisons turn the teenager's head? A teenager, remember, although it's so, so easy to forget their youth when you watch them in action.

But 14-year-old Therese Marren will probably be fine; she might even fare better than that other teenager in the news last week, the boy footballer. What's his name again? Ah yeah: Dwayne Mooney. Or something.

She'll handle it, just as she coped when she came on as a sub for Sligo in the 38th minute of yesterday's junior All-Ireland football final and proceeded to score a goal and take a hand in another. There was you thinking 14-year-old Irish girls spent their Sunday afternoons combing their My Little Pony's hair.

TG4, to their credit, realised a while back that the country's packed with Therese Marrens spending their weekends soloing, fielding and hand-passing, rather than attempting to get the knots out of plastic horses' synthetic manes.

You'd probably call it a sporting revolution, with an estimated 90,000 playing women's Gaelic football this weather. Those who might have chortled when the channel took to covering their games weren't chortling any more when they heard of last year's viewing figures for the senior final: 187,000, 21 per cent of all those watching television in the Republic at that time, giving TG4 the highest viewing figures in their history.

When he bid us "slán" from Croke Park yesterday only Micheál Ó Domhnaill's eyebrows were visible above the throng of celebrating Galwegian girls on the pitch, intermingling with a few Kildare woman, still making merry after their junior win, achieved despite Marren's best efforts. The Lady Lilies, they call Kildare. Love it.

And what of the other teenager, Roooooney? "He's what we used to call a match-winner, Bill, which means he can win matches," Johnny Giles explained to Bill O'Herlihy as they debated whether he is the Second Coming or just a half-promising young fella (Bill's face said: "Jaysus, Gilesie, you don't have to spell it out. I understand English").

The verdict? "With God's blessing - and he is the most divine player - he'll have the most magnificent career," said Eamon Dunphy - 1-0 to Wayne.

Giles agreed, if not in quite so Godly a way: 2-0. It was 3-0 by the time the Sunday Telegraph's Patrick Barclay cast judgment on Sky Sports' Sunday Supplement: "in terms of sheer precociousness and impact I think the comparison with Pele is reasonable."

By full-time, though, it was a draw, Roooooney being pegged back by George Best and football writers Patrick Collins and Joe Lovejoy.

"Rooney is the new Pele? You really do have to be joking," read the headline on Collins's piece in the Mail on Sunday, a sentiment Lovejoy (the Sunday Times) concurred with on the Sunday Supplement.

"It's all a bit premature, isn't it," he said, suggesting that young Wayne go away and score 1,000 goals before he could expect to be mentioned in the same breath as the Brazilian deity.

"Is he actually better at 18 than you were?" Best was asked on the BBC's Football Focus.

"Em, no," he said.

We did worry, though, about how up to date Best was with Wayne's world when he guaranteed us that "sooner or later the press will come up with something, nothing to do with football, on him".

Earth to Georgie?

"So he's got to get the people around him to say to him 'do not get yourself into trouble off the field' because they will come for you, doesn't matter how great you are. But from what I've seen I don't think he has too much to worry about."

George? Where have you been?

Back on the Sunday Supplement they were reading extracts from a newspaper interview with Paul Gascoigne in which he pleaded with Rooney to learn from his, Gascoigne's, mistakes. Gascoigne warned him that the press would make mincemeat of him. For example, if he was seen in a bar having one pint they'd report that he had 10.

Lovejoy smiled. Sympathetically. "Well," he said, "the trouble with Gazza was that when they said he was having 10 pints . . . he was having 10 pints. And a bottle of brandy."