Safety first but Sky put on a polished debut performance

The sky didn’t fall in. And nobody drowned, except Offaly. You couldn’t pin that on the lifeguard in charge.

A slick debut from Murdoch’s stylists. Just a few things to get used to.

There was a nod to the freewheeling, interchanging whirlwind that is modern hurling in the way Jamesie, Ollie and Brian Carney switched and swapped positions all Saturday evening, the Wyse puck-out strategy inviting Canning to make space in his chair for Carney to fill.

Jamesie, too, roved as in his pomp, spending much of the evening jabbing a screen in the Gary Neville role. But when he did go back to his wing, the togs were Jamie tight and the legs locked provocatively at trademark Redknapp twenty past eight.

Small mercies; no 3D yet.

Even the ads; we have travelled a long way from liverfluke prevention to the new Kasabian album. Though some who have heard it say it is scour.

Cody, too, offered a gesture to the sense of occasion, emerging in a gilet. It was to be his only concession to a new way of doing things.

Sky’s Game of Thrones-style intro had suggested a touch of fantasy and there was a bit of that in the build-up too, as they tried to make a case for Whelahan’s boys.

“But do they believe?” wondered reporter Damian Lawlor when he cornered the gaffer. Brian didn’t sound too sure. It was asking a lot of the rest of us to suspend disbelief.

There was never any danger Cody would do a Sherwood and rip off the gilet and the fantasy was riddled with plot holes within 15 minutes.

In the gantry, Mike Finnerty spent much of the first half pestering Nicky English about what Offaly might do. You nearly heard Nicky leafing the fine print in his contract to see could he say we might as well all pack up and go home.

“Excuse-me hurling,” Ger Loughnane would have called it and it was excuse-me punditry at the break, compared, at least, to the roastings Ger has often given the Faithful County.

“What will Brian Whelahan be saying to get them back into this game?” enquired Rachel.

Take the lifeguard’s float and summon as many as possible ashore? Before the night was out, both Nicky and Ollie would trot out the discrete code words for absolute disaster: “proud hurling county.” Wyse, too, would stick with politeness. “That fifth goal made things more difficult for Offaly.”

But at least Carney held his hands up and admitted trying to sell us a pig in a poke. “We didn’t want to address this before the game. We wanted to give Offaly a chance going into it. But the state of Offaly hurling…” We never got a confession like that out of Richard Keys.

Jamesie had been the workhorse all night. The circles and arrows didn’t always hit the mark and at times he brandished the Skypad with the handle as though he was set to do a bit of plastering.

In what they might hail, back in Isleworth, as ‘cracking bantz, mate’; he even coaxed the machinery into a roll-call of latecomers on the Tullamore terrace last year.

But when it was finally time to stand and be counted himself, Jamesie didn’t shirk and gave the Offaly County Board both barrels. “Light years behind.”

Sky light years ahead, as some insisted they would be? Not quite, but a few tidy innovations.

Club names on the line-ups might have offered some succour to these increasingly marginalised institutions. And there will be days when the hooks, blocks and tackles stats as well as the contested ground and aerial ball numbers will be more useful.

But contrary to expectations, there was no remedial course for the uninitiated, ensuring plenty of bemusement and amusement on places like Twitter.

“Just watched five minutes of hurling. WTF is going on? There’s a GK but they keep smashing it over the bar. How the f*** does he save that?”

They will get used to that and we will get used to this. “Contenders versus pretenders,” Finnerty called it at the start. Once they got the pretence out of the way, Sky look contenders alright.