'Telling' it like it is... or isn't

Mary Hannigan watches the ‘Aprés Match’ team limber up ahead of the finals, and assesses our viewing options over the next month

Terry 'Tel' Venables is explaining the 'Christmas Tree' formation to You're On Sky Sports presenter Rob McCaffrey, telling him that one of its great advantages is that it can be "intertactically interchangeable". Rob nods in awe and slaps his desk in wonder.

Steve's on the line and he wants Tel's opinion on what formation Sven (or "Seven", as Tel calls him) will use in Germany. "He'll go down to the drawing board, get down to brass tactics and pick 11 players, they'll go out on to the field and deploy in such a manner as to play in the hole," says Tel. Rob nods again, but Steve admits to being none the wiser.

The next caller is Malcolm from Shepherd's Bush, where he's sitting on a toilet in an Argos hotel, watching the telly in the bedroom through the open door. He wants to know what players will be the stars of the World Cup. "A great question, unusual angle," says Rob, "over to you Tel."

"Well, when you go to the World Cup you get a lot of World Cup players playing in it and they's all full internationals so I think you've got to say they've got World Cup quality about them," he says. Rob asks Tel to be a touch more specific.

"The Europeans, they're good, and sometimes you might have a lad from Asia because they're fast and I think there are a lot of countries in Africa but I don't know if they're playing in the World Cup but there's a lot of them," he says.

Malcolm, still sitting on the toilet in the Shepherd's Bush hotel, is unimpressed. He'd like Tel to actually pick a player or two he should look out for.

"Well, Brazil have a lad called Ronaldinho. He's got legs, he can get low and high at the same time, he can make it all about where he's at so I think he's a fella what we will look out for. He wears a yellow top."

Malcolm remains unimpressed. He was hoping Tel would tell him about a player “we haven’t heard of”, but Tel points out that if “we haven’t heard of him, how can I tell you about him.”

It turns a little ugly then, a slanging match ensues between Tel and Malcolm, before Rob intervenes. Yep, Aprés Match is in training for the World Cup, and if their early form is an indication of what’s to come Barry Murphy, Risteard Cooper and Gary Cooke might just go all the way to the final.

True, their brand of World Cup punditry can, at times, be indistinguishable from the real thing, especially on ITV (it’s not entirely unlikely, for example, that Venables will at some point describe Sven’s England formation as “intertactically interchangeable“), but at least Aprés Match intend being funny.

“Hi Miriam,” says Cooke, casually, as he chats outside the studio where the Aprés Match team is recording a batch of World Cup sketches. “Hi,” squeaks “Miriam O’Callaghan” as she takes her seat in the Prime Time studio. How long Risteard Cooper spent in make-up isn’t clear, but he looks ravishing.

“I suppose Ireland not being in this World Cup gives us a bit of a blank canvas,” says Cooke, “last time, of course, events in Saipan and back home pretty much dictated what we did, with Dunphy and all that. We’ve recorded a lot of the stuff already but will do reaction sketches as the World Cup goes on, so who knows what characters will crop up.”

The 2006 World Cup will mark the 10th anniversary of the original Aprés Match team, then made up of just Cooper and Murphy, with Cooke (aka Eamon Dunphy, John Giles, Alex Ferguson, Bono, etc) joining up for France ’98.

The Venables sketch is so absurdly hilarious it has to be re-done when uncontrollable giggling is heard in the background as it’s replayed. And when Tel says “the Europeans” are worth watching out for in Germany, Cooke and Cooper dissolve into laughter and simply can’t stop. Murphy, in another studio, hardly helps with his “Malcolm” comments down the line. Cut. Time to start again.

So, if a few weeks of ITV and BBC fretting over you-know-who’s dodgy metatarsal proves too much, RTÉ will provide comic relief. And, along with Aprés Match, there will be their “Gatecrasher” feature in which Ger Gilroy will tour all 12 World Cup cities in Germany in a camper van, in search of a different angle on the whole event.

ITV (on their ITV4 channel) will attempt to produce their own sideways look at the tournament through World Cuppa, a one-hour nightly show presented by Christian O’Connell, while the BBC will largely rely on Ian Wright to provide an, um, alternative view of the event.

The ITV punditry panel is largely made up of managers who wanted but didn’t get the England job – Sam Allardyce, Alan Curbishley and Stuart Pearce – while Gordon Strachan and World Cup winners Leonardo and Marcel Desailly will join the usual suspects on the BBC.

Whether any of the pundits prove as geographically challenged as their predecessors (eg Andy Townsend: “the Belgians will play like their fellow Scandinavians, Denmark and Sweden”), or, more famously, Paul Gascoigne (“Senegal, which, beforehand, I’ve never heard of, looked very impressive”) remains to be seen, but whatever happens it should be fun.

And maybe even intertactically interchangeable.