"The system seemed to work, " he probes, somehow keeping a straight face. "The system works, but we should have scored more goals, " replies the soon to be retired English coach as the wool is pulled over the eyes of 50 million Englishmen for the last time before the misery is actually ended six days later against Portugal.

Back in the RTE studio, Bill O'Herlihy is looking at the camera with an impish smirk on his face.

"Well, " he says, offering it to the panel of John Giles, Liam Brady, Eamon Dunphy and Graeme Souness.

"That's the first time I've seen sex between two men on the BBC, " exclaims Dunphy, an utterance that scooped him quote of the tournament from The Guardian. At this point Souness is nearly salivating trying to get his point in as he waits for his three colleagues to pour scorn on Crooks and Eriksson.

"You've asked me to come here and make comment about World Cup games, " he finally interjects. "This has been a reality check for me and I cannot believe what I have just heard from an ex-player that is supposed to know how the game is played."

The Scotsman's comment was about Crooks and his selective eyesight, but the first part of it could well have been directed towards the new environment he had found himself in. He admitted afterwards that the candidness of what he had heard on RTE was a refreshing experience, something completely different to the mundane toeing-the-partyline diet of Sky television, a medium where players and managers alike are rarely given a hard time.

That mantra is brought into focus in the shape of the clean-cut Jamie Redknapp. The former Liverpool and England player's commitments to the station have increased exponentially over the last year, but you just always get the feeling that George W Bush will a holiday home in the centre of Baghdad before Redknapp criticises a fellow pro.

Such chumminess is a far cry from where it all began in 1970 when ITV invented the notion of a pundit panel. Never before had the independent broadcaster beaten their rival, the BBC, in a ratings war at a major sporting event, but the World Cup in Mexico that year changed all that. Jimmy Hill was to chair proceedings with Derek Dougan, Paddy Crerand, Malcolm Allison and Bob McNab the men to accompany him. The quartet were put up in the Hendon Hotel in London and woken up with a glass of champagne before being shipped to the studio everyday. There, Allison would sit puffing his cigar, while Crerand and Dougan argued as only Scotsmen and Irishmen could. McNab, who was the quiet man of the crew, rang a bell when he wished to try and get a sentence in.

It made for enthralling television and the flamboyancy and hard-hitting analysis caught their competitors on the hop, but more importantly the public's imagination. Slowly they started to switch channels and the trickle became a torrent when the ITV panel pitched for the Brazilians, that in sharp contrast to the BBC's analysis of Samba soccer which was lukewarm at best. "It was the first panel and I was lucky enough to have played a part in the selection of it, " Hill told Mad About Sport. "They had personality. They had a sense of fun and they were deep believers in their view of how the game should be played. That was important. The Malcolm Allisons and the Derek Dougans had strong views and they weren't shy. But they also had a sense of fun. It was unique and what it has amounted to now is phenomenal. But I do think there was more humour in it then, than there is now. A bit of fun almost always occurred because of the personalities of who were involved. They'd have an argument and thoroughly enjoy it and have a laugh about it afterwards."

The quality of analysis and entertainment didn't go unnoticed on this side of the Irish Sea and Tim O'Connor, who would later become head of sport at RTE, was on the look out for a similar character to perform the function in Ireland. That year he accompanied Jimmy Magee to Sweden for a European Championship qualifier and there Magee interviewed a younger Eamon Dunphy. It didn't take long for O'Connor to realise he had found his man.

"Jimmy was doing a profile of this guy called Eamon Dunphy, " he explained. "I was just amazed by Eamon's ability to perform in front of a microphone. It is unusual that you would find a sportsman with the kind of passion and intelligence and commitment that Eamon then had. That was 1970 and I had earmarked him then."

During that year also, and on the other side of the Atlantic, the former New York Yankees, Seattle Pilots and Houston Astros pitcher, Jim Bouton, penned a book that would change the way people viewed professional sport and the people who partook in it. Ball Four, a work that is said to have inspired Dunphy in his journalism career, laid bare everything to do with a baseball team from the home runs to the drug use. It was essentially the diary of Bouton's time during the 1969 season, the only one the Pilots ever existed, and to say it was controversial would be an understatement. In fact it caused such resentment amongst the game's hierarchy and players that Bouton wasn't even allowed attend a baseball related function at Yankee Stadium until 1998, some 28 years after the book was published. The honest and hard-hitting nature of Ball Four certainly struck a chord with the public, however, and Bouton became something of a celebrity years later.

The same could be said of Dunphy, but it would be 1978 before O'Connor's wish came true and his man came on board to become the lynchpin of RTE's original panel for the World Cup that year in Argentina. There were other fleeting contributors, the one-time Ireland manager Liam Tuohy being one of them, but it was Dunphy who was the only ever present. That was despite the fact that he crashed John Giles' wife's mini into a lamppost on Appian Way close to the RTE Studios. The smash saw him spend a few days in St Vincent's hospital before he resumed his punditry wearing dark glasses to disguise his cuts.

Single-handedly Dunphy brought the burgeoning profession of punditry to an Irish audience only too willing to disagree with him on whether Michel Platinti "was a good player, not a great player" during the big soccer tournaments of the '82 World Cup and the '84 European Championships.

Although events proved the pundit to be wide of the mark in this instance, Dunphy's presence and more importantly his persistence in sticking to his opinion even when he was patently on thin ice, was something which struck a chord with the watching soccer fan. It wasn't balanced but it was great television and the next level would be to find someone who could argue the other side of the coin with him.

Almost by accident, RTE stumbled upon Johnny Giles as the missing piece of the jigsaw. Where Dunphy was volatile and brash, Giles was analytical and sober when there was a sense of devil and insouciance in the Dunphy persona, the former Leeds anchorman brought a nous and understanding of what was required in players which no one had done in punditry before. Laurel and Hardy, Morecambe and Wise, Giles and Dunphy. In simple terms, there was a chemistry between them which was much greater than the sum of their two parts.

Ironically Giles was not one to open up in those days and was suspicious of the media. Indeed he could only be persuaded to embrace the idea of becoming a talking head on the basis that it was on a temporary basis. But one tournament led to another, O'Connor knew that he had finally hit on the combination the he and the public were looking for. Some 21 years later they are still going strong and have been joined by Brady, who is said to have come on board for some editorial balance when Dunphy entrenched himself on the side of Roy Keane during the Saipan debacle.

"We deliberately went out to do this, to get a good cop, bad cop scenario, " says O'Connor of the initial hunt for Dunphy's partner. "You get the performer and you get the stolid guy. You actually have to cover the spectrum of the audience because for everybody that hated Eamon you had people who loved him. But you didn't want the people who hated him to turn off, so you then had to get his opposite and John Giles was Eamon's perfect opposite. The fact that they were friends was just coincidental."

With RTE hitting on a winning formula they branched off into other sports and set about creating the same eclectic range of views. In rugby Tom McGurk has taken on the role of Bill O'Herlihy brilliantly and George Hook, together with Brent Pope, could be carbon copies of Dunphy and Giles. Even in horse racing, a sport where views and debate may be a little more sedate than others, they have created a top pair in Robert Hall and Ted Walsh.

They may sound like they came from different planets, but the chemistry is there and they represent the interests of national hunt and flat racing together. And of course the GAA is represented in this regard too as Colm O'Rourke and Joe Brolly attempt to polarise a nation and give some analysis in the process. There is a common theme throughout those panels and it's one that Giles is fond of pointing out. Honesty of effort is your starting point and that's something O'Connor had to point out to George Hook in his early RTE days in the late '90s.

"George was so anxious to be successful, " he says.

"He was so anxious to appeal because a lot of the other things that apparently he had turned his hand to in his life weren't particularly rewarding. I never saw a man work as hard at getting his research right and trying to be as conscientious in his preparation as George was. But I had to tell him that while what he was doing was admirable it was not what was required. What was required was honesty and integrity because people are eventually going to see through the sham artist. They are going to see because television is a very revealing medium. If you expose yourself for long enough on it people will see you for the clever guy that you are or the arsehole that you are or the decent guy that you are. You cannot continue a charade so you have to go back to being honest."

The charade will begin again next month with the resumption of the Premier League season. The presence of Setanta Sports means that never before will there have been as many live matches and as result never before will they be have been discussed as much. Maybe that's the problem with the Redknapps or the Shearers . . . over exposure.

They can't be good all of the time. Just be good once, though. Is that asking too much?