Hard to believe, but it’s 25 years since David Elleray, the Harrow headmaster who spent his Saturdays admonishing a very different class of brat, was wired for sound for ITV’s World In Action programme on a First Division game between Millwall and Arsenal at the old Den.

Thursday morning, Dublin. It’s early. Way too early.

It’s time again to dust off the joke book and dig up those old enmities.

We are the boys in green

David Campese has uttered the odd verbal gaffe in his time, but the Wallaby legend was prescient enough to foresee the direction rugby was already taking when he announced his formal retirement from the game back in 1999 after one of the most wondrous of careers.

Luis Suarez’s injury. Italy training in a sauna. Leighton Baines’ reading habits.

For almost 50 years BBC’s Grandstand show defined Saturday afternoons in the UK and it came to do something similar here in Ireland for many of us once the signal for the British channels began to be picked up beyond the east coast.

It was while gazing through the NFL schedule for 2014, which was revealed earlier this week, and other gridiron-related matters that our eyes happened to stray across a well-worn quote from John Madden, the Hall of Fame ex-coach, broadcasting legend and the face of millions of American football computer games around the world.

Sitting down with Aidan O’Shea in Croke Park earlier this week, it was impossible to avoid the contrast between the words escaping the Mayo footballer’s mouth and what was transpiring just across the River Liffey in Leinster House, where Paraic Duffy and Liam O’Neill were appearing before an Oireachtas committee.

I was five when I ended a brief dalliance with Bobby Robson’s Ipswich Town, swayed by the history of the Busby Babes, Munich, the Fifth Beatle and The King.