T he RTE programme The Sunday Game is perhaps now the most professionally produced programme emanating from the station, making full and intelligent use of the techniques of television to analyse games with a sophistication which surpasses anything BBC or ITV have ever done on sport.

Actually, those aren't my words. They appeared in Magill magazine in September 1982. How different an era that was can be gauged by the fact that the same column described Croke Park as "one of the dreariest and tattiest stadia in this part of the world . . . the Hogan Stand is just a big haybarn, the corridors behind it are dirty concrete alleyways."

Croke Park is very different today but the format of The Sunday Game hasn't changed all that much in the intervening 27 years. It is almost as much of a national institution as the championships it covers. The Sunday Game is always with us.

RTE regard criticism of the programme as largely irrelevant and counter it by pointing to the high viewing figures which The Sunday Game continues to enjoy. This is nonsense, of course, as the programme has something of a captive audience. If The Sunday Game was the worst programme on RTE, which it isn't, people would still tune in to watch the championships. The same would apply if it was the station's best programme. It's not. Like the championships themselves, The Sunday Game is a mixture of the sublime and the ridiculous.

This year's model has improved in some respects. Gone are the vox pops and the text messages for viewers while the quick potted player-by-player analysis of the teams works much better than the old habit of just showing the line-up and picking out a few potential stars. The programme also benefits hugely from the quality of its analysts, in particular Tomas Mulcahy and Michael Duignan who have become every bit as good as the much vaunted soccer duo of John Giles and Eamon Dunphy.

Duignan and Mulcahy do not suffer from the two diseases which have bedevilled many Sunday Game panellists over the years. The first is a tendency to act the 'character', as if the most important thing is not the match but the fact that the panellist in question is analysing it. This was the besetting sin of Ger Loughnane and the ignoble tradition is carried on by Tommy Lyons, who jig acts like a nervous priest trying to ingratiate himself with new and unfriendly parishioners.

On Saturday, Lyons was straight into his stride. "It's a while Michael, since we saw skilful six foot five men," he said in an obvious reference to co-panellist Anthony Tohill. "There's one there beside you," quipped Michael Lyster, ever ready with the punchline. I thought I'd die from the laughing.

The second is a mealy-mouthed refusal to call a spade a spade for fear of incurring somebody's wrath. Dara O Cinneide's credibility suffered a great deal with his hemming and hawing over the Paul Galvin affair last year. Anthony Tohill is a similar master of prevarication.

Mulcahy, on the other hand, tells it straight. In the last couple of games, he pointed out, Tommy Walsh has looked more interested in taking the man out of the game than playing hurling. He'll tell the viewers, "I can't understand why Dan Shanahan, a former hurler of the year, isn't in the Waterford line-up." To paraphrase 'Messin With the Kid', an old live favourite of Mulcahy's fellow Corkman Rory Gallagher, this is a man who says what he means and means what he says. His dominating presence in the studio, where he sometimes seems to be both analyst and anchorman, lets newcomers like Declan Ruth and Paul Flynn know that they have a licence to talk about the game seriously and honestly with no concessions to outside opinion.

People are prone to underestimate Duignan, perhaps because of that casual delivery which makes him sound like a postman throwing a greeting over his shoulder as he moves towards the next house. But it is this low-key manner which makes the former Offaly star such a refreshing change when so much sports commentary is saturated with hyperbole and unearned excitement.

Yet, whether guessing rightly twice that Joe Canning was going to try for a goal from frees, pointing out how the Kilkenny half-back line were dropping back to reduce the space available to the Galway full-forwards, criticising Barry Kelly's whistle-happy tendencies or bemoaning the "antagonisation" John Mullane suffered at the hands of the Limerick backs, Duignan is astute, intelligent and adds to your enjoyment of the game. Which is the point of analysts in the first place.

The football panellists are slightly less impressive and on Sunday the proceedings were completely overshadowed by the personality clash between Joe Brolly and Pat Spillane which at times resembled the domestic travails of John and Mary from Father Ted.

There are two fundamentally different philosophies at work here. Brolly is like the man who emerges from an exhibition of modern art raving about how the artist has embraced issues of gender and colonialism while interrogating the failed strategies of representation in a neo-expressionist context. Spillane is the lad who leaves the gallery muttering "that fella can't even draw a straight line."

The Derryman does have a tendency to over-intellectualise at times, seeing templates, patterns and strategies in even the most mediocre and negative games. Yet he is trying to say something meaningful about the games and it is understandable that he feels frustrated by his Kerry counterpart's relentless stream of simplistic bon mots. On Sunday, this boiled over to the extent that Brolly accused Spillane of ignorance, and told him, "I bet you don't even know the rules," and shouted, "hold on a second sir," when his fellow panellist tried to interrupt him for the umpteenth time.

And when, after Spillane suggested that Derry were playing the ball so slowly to their forwards that, "your grandmother would be back in defence," an exasperated Brolly sighed, "Yeah, trot the grandmother out." Like any argument the sniping was initially interesting before becoming first boring and eventually embarrassing. It can't really go on like this and it's Spillane who'll have to change. The grandmother has been trotted out too often at this stage.

The Sunday night highlights programme has been improved since Des Cahill replaced Spillane. Affable, enthusiastic and self-effacing, Cahill is an ideal anchorman and his one weakness on Sportscall, the excessive politeness which made him reluctant to call time on even the most obvious lunatics, doesn't come into play.

He is, however, hampered by being at the helm of a programme which achieves the remarkable feat of being too long yet excessively frantic at the same time. Sunday's edition lasted an hour and 45 minutes yet there were times when Cahill was hurrying the panellists along at such a pace you almost expected him to produce a whip.

Given the amount of material the programme has to deal with, time is always going to be at a premium. That's why there's no need for lengthy competition details (stick them on the website) or reports on first-round camogie matches with nobody at them (OB Sport). And even if the programme had hours to spare, there would be no excuse for dross like the item where Spillane went to Charlestown to coach a ladies junior football team.

With hilarious comedy stuff like Spillane deciding whether he'd wear a Mayo or Kerry jersey to training, shouts of "up the pace ladies," and "they're brilliant girls," from the man himself and a bit of audience participation at the end which wouldn't have been out of place on Bosco, "Are we going to win the championship? I said, are we going to win the championship?" this was the most dispiriting thing I've seen on television since that programme where Amanda Brunker's breasts hosted a dinner party. In all its condescending, buck-lepping glory it would have disgraced the most amateurish local cable channel. A station which gave us the excellent Pride of the Parish series should be above this nonsense.

As the season goes on there will be weekends when there are even more games to deal with. Perhaps RTE should revisit the idea of having a Monday Game analysis programme. It would take the pressure off the Sunday night edition and give the panellists a bit more time to think about things as well.

About the commentators, you can only say that Marty Morrissey has improved a great deal in recent years whereas Ger Canning remains sui generis. When his namesake Joe scored Galway's first goal on Saturday Ger let out a roar of, "If Real Madrid did hurling they'd be signing him and sending Kaka and Ronaldo out on gardening duty." Whether you think this is (a) a stupid comment or (b) a very stupid comment, (Gardening duty? Real Madrid 'doing' hurling?), will have some bearing on where you stand on the great Ger Canning question. The great Ger Canning question is, of course, why? In the name of God, why?

You can see how good The Sunday Game is in terms of production values by comparing it to the BBC Northern Ireland and TV3 shows. In a way it's like the football championships. If there are no rule changes to clamp down on foul play, people will still watch the football championships in the same numbers. They just won't enjoy it as much. The improvements are owed to the spectators.

So it goes with The Sunday Game. We all know it's good and we all wish it was great. It's more like Waterford hurlers than Wexford hurlers. But it would be nice if it was Kilkenny.