Optimistic Tanner gets his hide tanned by Old Firm supporters

TV VIEW: AFTER THE week that was in it, it was probably less than ideal that an Old Firm game was scheduled for Sunday, but there was always a fair chance it would happen, these matches do tend to come around quite often.

Indeed, when Sky’s David Tanner said it was “the 300th league meeting of the teams” you half assumed he meant since Christmas, but it was actually just the seventh Old Firm encounter of the season. This pair make Real Madrid and Barcelona seem like strangers.

“Great colour, great atmosphere and, so far, positive messages are coming from the supporters,” said Tanner as the camera panned around Ibrox before kick-off. And with that a Celtic fan thrust two fingers in the direction of his Union Jack-wielding hosts, before disappearing from view under a sea of Tricolours. And one Palestinian flag.

It’d be good craic trying to explain it all to, say, Celtic’s Ki Sung-Yeung and Rangers’s Madjid Bougherra. “So, in 1690 there was the Battle of the Boyne and then . . . ” You know, any notion they might have had about it only being a game would be well and truly busted.

Any way, Tanner addressed the issue of the parcel bombs sent to Neil Lennon and others, and expressed the wish that the game would be a demonstration of how “the football community can show a lead to the rest of society”.

Now, Tanner, didn’t say it, but you half guessed he hoped Lennon would get a nice welcome in the stadium, as a kind of a show of solidarity against the nutters. That kind of thing.

The Celtic fans, naturally, obliged. “There’s only one Neil Lennon”, they bellowed. “Neil Lennon, you w****r, you w****er,” came the reply.

Okay, so that didn’t work too well.

By the time a rousing rendition of Amhrán na bhFiann was countered with an equally lusty delivery of God Save The Queen , Tanner opted to focus on the football. It was for the best, really.

The 0-0 draw means that that particular title race is still on the wide open side, but south a bit Manchester United edged a teeny bit closer to the English crown with that comfy win over Everton.

The highlight of the occasion wasn’t actually the 83rd-minute winning goal, it was the scorer, Spanish-speaking Mexican Javier Hernandez, translating Portuguese-speaking Brazilian Anderson’s words in to English for Sky after the game. “Wow,” gasped Jamie Redknapp, “he’s an intelligent boy on AND off the pitch!”

While Chelsea might well have been cursing the intelligent boy’s intervention on the Old Trafford pitch, they at least kept the pressure on by grinding out a narrow 3-0 win against West Ham later in the day.

It was much as ESPN pundit Alan Curbishley had anticipated, the absence of the injured Scott Parker leaving him fearing for the Hammers.

Mind you, he noted Avram Grant had “brought Parker’s legs in to midfield” in the form of Jonathan Spector, so he wasn’t, in fairness, entirely missing.

Arsenal yesterday? Cohen, Cohen gone?

Mind you, they can take hope from Cork, their bid for the Division One title looked done and dusted yesterday, too, when they trailed Dublin by a not inconsiderable eight points, the Dubs’ Cesc Fabregas, Bernard Brogan, the author of much of their woes.

And look what happened?

A lively old encounter it was too, not least that half-time dust-up in the tunnel. Ah, handbags at the end of the day, most probably concluded. “Handbags, deireadh an lae,” said a TG4 voice over the pictures. Sporting handbags, then, are an international language.

There was almost, incidentally, a bit of handbags on Sky News later in the afternoon when John McCririck and Rupert Arnold, chief executive of the National Trainers Federation, squared up over the issue of the use of the whip in horse racing.

McCririck loudly applauded the decision of Towcester racecourse to ban the use of the whip at their meetings from October, insisting that horses having the bejaysus whipped out of them by over-eager jockeys was “a cancer that’s eating inside racing”.

Rupert reckoned this language was a bit “emotive” and felt there should be some room for compromise.

Like, only hitting half the bejaysus out of them? He didn’t say.

“There cannot be ANY compromise, the public are sickened by it, it’s almost merciless,” McCririck replied, leaving Rupert a touch exasperated.

“This is a moral position,” said McCririck. “You can’t hit anything that’s living in life, only race horses! You can’t hit a cat! You can’t hit a dog! You can’t even hit your wife these days!”

Rupert really had no answer to that. So he didn’t try to find one.