SKY SPORTS love their technical innovations. Super slomo, unnecessarily slo-mo, a lorry load of stylish graphics and statistics, a choice of commentaries and camera angles, and so on, ad infinitum. But for all the bells and whistles what their coverage could really do with is some simple integrity. Even Richard Keys must have gotten to the point where he wants to punch himself as he shamelessly sits there week after week claiming that Middlesbrough v Watford doth a Super Sunday make.

It doth not.

Jamie Redknapp has become their goto guy when it comes to pundits and it is a match made in masochist heaven.

Redknapp is as glossy and vapid as the production around him, and quite how someone can be so eager and earnest about saying absolutely nothing is a conundrum worthy of Carol Vorderman and crew.

Their attempts to airbrush all the wrinkles and flaws from what the public see are getting very tiring. Ultimately all that should matter is the game being shown, and in last Sunday's Carling Cup final they had a belter on their hands. Two managers that didn't bother concealing their contempt for each other, Arsenal's youngsters giving Chelsea as much as a run-around as they've had at any point in Jose Mourinho's reign, Didier Drogba's muscular excellence, John Terry getting kicked in the face and a brawl to round it all off. What's not to like there?

But despite having 12,000 cameras (approximately) in the Millennium Stadium Sky showed only one replay of the Terry incident, a judgement call we'll allow them on the grounds it initially looking like being very serious.

What was inexcusable was the refusal to show even one replay of the brawl at the end. Who started it? Why is Wayne Bridge on the ground? Why was that guy sent off? All those questions and all those camera angles and Sky decided to bury its head in the sand. Did they think viewers would switch off? Or that parents around the world would be shocked and stop buying their children replica jerseys? Regardless, it's simply Sky's usual approach of insulting their viewer's intelligence.

Incidentally, when the replays finally surfaced later that night on Sky Sports News, they weren't even so much handbags as push-and-drag bags, and the most shameful aspect of the whole incident was Bridge's hilariously theatrical reaction to being brushed by Emmanuel Eboue's hand. Actually 'brushed' is an overstatement. Let's just hope he's suitably mortified.

Mortified is how most guests end up on The Podge & Rodge Show but Mick O'Dwyer has never been afraid of a challenge (insert your own Wicklow joke here). The main attraction of the prurient and puerile puppets is their ability to relentlessly insult Z-list celebrities that you kinda feel deserve it anyway. But the brothers kept it all above board with Micko, never getting more controversial than a few lame Kerryman jokes, clearly well aware they were dealing with GAA royalty.

Lucy Kennedy may not have been so sure. Her introduction of Micko was delivered with the cadence as a boxing announcer, and included mystifying phrases like, "The undertaker, never the dead guy" and "The Hugh Hefner of the GAA world." Obviously the many pictures of Micko wearing shades and on his way into the newest, hippest club in town with a bevy of scantily-clad beauties draped around him have passed me by, but if that's his day job he should really give up this football trainer nonsense.

The political affairs documentary What in the World? technically falls outside the remit of a sports TV column, but it's introduced by Leeside beefcake and sometime hurler S�an �g � hAilp�n so that's enough of a tenuous link for us.

It probably would be for S�an �g too.

His introduction to an episode on the Khmer Rouge's reign of terror basically amounted to, "If you think Ireland was bad in the '70s, at least you didn't live in Cambodia."

But no matter, the documentaries themselves are excellent and S�an �g, even if his contributions here feel a little shoehorned in, could well become a fixture on our screens. He definitely has the charisma to carry it off, and only a sportsman who commands the respect he does could speak about weighty political issues without seeming totally anomalous. Had a GAA thinktank gotten together in a Gothic castle with Dr Frankenstein they couldn't have created a better ambassador for the association. Given Croke Park's step into the international arena and the country's burgeoning multi-cultural status, he's the perfect mix of Irish and exotic while also exuding sincerity and integrity. Maybe Sky Sports should sign him.