Only 1,433 days to the 2014 World Cup in Brazil and already the anticipation is mounting. Can the French stop shooting themselves in the foot or stabbing each other in the back? (Choose your own cliché.) Will Ireland, under new manager Marco Tardelli, build on their impressive run to the semi-finals of the 2012 European championships? Can RTÉ’s “panel of experts” put behind them the disaster of the summer of 2010, when they provided some of the most depressing television since Boys From the Blackstuff?

Watching them every match day for the last month, sometimes three times a day, was hard work. They seemed to exist in a bubble far removed from the rest of the world. While fans of all levels of interest – from the obsessives who took three weeks off work to watch the tournament, to the more casual passers-by – were giddy with excitement at some of what they were seeing, RTÉ’s “experts” were relentlessly, gratuitously, negative. I lost count of the number of times that a game produced drama, controversy, enough talking points for a week, only to be greeted at the end by Giles and Dunphy looking like somebody had stolen their penguins. “That was terrible, Bill,” they would pronounce. “Rubbish.” The experience, the excitement of being a fan had no place on RTÉ. It was like watching a bunch of economists talk about fiscal stimulus as though the models and projections they were discussing had no relevance to real people and real lives. On so many occasions, BBC and ITV proved a welcome relief from all the macho intensity.

Giles and Dunphy were the worst, but their negativity seemed to affect almost everybody else. Liam Brady looked like he was living on Melancholy Hill for the month. Ossie Ardiles was ridiculously serious. Dietmar Hamann appeared to have been programmed in advance. Only Ronnie Whelan managed to muster up regular enthusiasm – he talked like a fan – and I liked him for that. Afternoon presenter Darragh Maloney, representing the future, also did his best to rise above the prevailing gloom.

If you read the interview with Giles, Dunphy and O’Herlihy in The Irish Times the weekend before the World Cup started, or listened to O’Herlihy talk to Matt Cooper on The Last Word on the day it began, you might have got a sense of problems ahead. It’s clear that all three men have become rather too fond of their reputation – much of it self-styled – as fearless seekers of the truth, who go where others (Sky, BBC, ITV) fear to tread. It’s become an article of faith with them, so much so that every conversation they have seems premised on a need to take down, reduce and criticise. Any sense of wonder or joy they may once have had about football seems to have evaporated. At their worst, they’re a misery to watch.

Their smugness about their bravery in attacking sacred cows this year seemed to result in a lack of preparation. They regularly appeared in studio not knowing the names of the players, or how many goals they’d scored in the tournament, or where the referee was from. There was a flabbiness about the whole thing, which contrasted with the sharpness of old. There used to be a gap between the quality of analysis on RTÉ and on BBC/ITV. This summer, that gap all but disappeared.

That’s partly to do with the huge difference in resources available to the tv channels involved. The BBC took almost 300 staff to South Africa and purpose built a studio with lovely views of Table Mountain in Cape Town. ITV took about 160 and set up shop in Johannesburg. RTÉ sent 12 people and had to make do with a small studio in Dublin that looked like a cross between an aquarium and a funky crematorium. BBC and ITV therefore had alternatives to constant analysis of the football and were able to give a sense of the atmosphere in South Africa and a feeling for what South Africans thought about the competition their country was hosting.

RTÉ had no option but to rely on its various panels of experts, which would have been fine if they had been functioning properly, but was disastrous when they were so cross and crotchety and unyieldingly, proudly, negative.

The old ways aren’t working any more at the national broadcaster, and it’s time to break up a team that’s no longer winning. Luckily, RTÉ has 1,433 days to get its house in order.

Pi... pi... pi... pick up a prison sentence

The kidnapping of Kelli the penguin by a bunch of inner city goons shows that it is not just rural Fianna Fáil backbenchers, Labour Party TDs (Tommy Broughan excepted) and headbangers like Mattie McGrath who support the terrorising of harmless and defenceless animals. According to McGrath, the Green Party’s deputy leader Mary White last week implied that he should have a frontal lobotomy, a suggestion which, for some reason, Mattie did not find helpful. A lobotomy would be too gentle a punishment for the thugs who stole Kelli. A short spell behind bars would be more suitable; they can then judge for themselves what it’s like to be in captivity.

ddoyle@tribune.ie