Mind you, it would help if he was getting some better advice from the sideline.

Surely there's a producer somewhere who can tell him to stop interrupting his guests. Every time somebody gets three-quarters of the way to making a point he cuts them off with a "but" or a different question entirely. A few weeks back Anthony Tohill (the most improved player in this year's championship) said, "Another interesting point about the game today wasf" before being cut off dead.

The best anchormen are unflashy, giving their panel straightforward questions that they can expand upon. Spillane though likes his off-the-cuff, frequently inflammatory comments, and while this was fine when Michael Lyster was sitting opposite him to calm him down, when his own guests end up having to be the voice of reason it naturally deflates the conversation as the question is always more interesting and provocative than the answer.

At least when the talk is of football Spillane is on familiar territory, but when he makes some of his outrageous, and frequently outrageously-uninformed, statements on hurling, I'm pretty sure I've seen Pete Finnerty clench a fist and count to 10 before answering. After untensing his jaw, his answer usually start with a terse, "No, Pat, " before he has to go and explain the sport he loves before he can even get started analysing it. Darragh Maloney and others with the word 'presenter' on their CV must be watching and tearing their hair out. It's time to make the switch and put Spillane back in the attack where he belongs.

Other selection decisions leave something to be desired, like the too-frequent matching of pundits with games featuring their home county. This can pay off in certain instances but by and large it's a recipe for boredom. Anthony Daly and Donal O'Grady were both sat in the studio with Spillane for the evening of SempleGate. Neither was very likely to criticise players they had gotten close to while coaching the two teams just a few years previously, and neither did. Surely a neutral observer would have had more freedom to admonish or defend as they saw fit?

O'Grady, in particular, has been a disappointment this year. He was the coach of a team that revolutionised hurling in recent years. He stood back and looked at the opposition and decided on what must be done to beat them:

Cork then took preparation to a whole new level, made tactics the game's new obsession and practically invented a style of play. This is a serious hurling mind, yet his comments almost always take the path of least resistance, staying vague and rarely analytical. Is he just being a cute Cork hoor and keeping his cards close to his chest? It also wears very thin when he never sees a tackle he doesn't like or a brawl worthy of more than the title "handbags".

The segment summarising the week's GAA news is ludicrous too, as by it's very definition it's way off the pace and will tell the average fan nothing new.

A nadir was reached last week as they explained how suspensions would rule three Cork players out of the clash with Waterford, a game we had seen earlier in the programme and an issue that had been discussed at length straight after. And this on a night when no time could be found to show even a frame of the Tipp-Limerick thriller from the previous evening.

Also if the opinion of the masses is so important to the producers they could run punters' text messages through a spellchecker before they broadcast them to the nation. And, seeing as we're ranting now, and there's no point in stopping, bring back the old music! This year's theme may be better than last year's Viking funeral song but I defy anybody to hum it. It's really just another layer of shoddiness for a programme that falls far below the national broadcaster's usually high standards of sports coverage. The Sunday Game team need to realise that just cause the sport they are covering is amateur, doesn't mean they can't be professional.