February 16, 2011
By Staff Reporter
From what I read in the following morning’s papers, this historic win was down to some truly heroic performances by great players. Yes, Ireland’s 18-9 triumph against Australia at Lansdowne Road on Saturday certainly caught the imagination of the nation’s media. The thing is it meant nothing to me because, sad to report, anything remotely connected to Irish rugby never has. Out of professional interest, I watched the game and yet, when Ireland were clinging tenaciously to their lead over the world champions in the dying stages, I couldn’t have cared less whether they prevailed or not. They could have gone another 34 years without beating the Wallabies at home and I wouldn’t have been in the slightest bit put out.
There are so many logical reasons for somebody of my generation to support the Irish rugby team that I’ve often tried to rethink this view in recent years. I mean, what’s not to like about a sport that is organized on a 32-county basis? It is a game that forces clubs from the most loyalist enclaves of Ulster to regularly visit places like Limerick and Cork, and that makes people in places like Limerick and Cork realize that our friends in the North can be just that. Who didn’t find it ironic and bizarrely hopeful when you used to be able to watch hard-line unionist second-row Davy Tweed standing to silent attention during the playing of “Amhran na Bhfiann” before internationals at Lansdowne Road? Can you think of a sporting situation that better encapsulated the two diverse traditions on the island?
For all that, rugby still means nothing to me or to a lot of my friends. Even Munster’s run of success in recent years — and judging by the number of their jerseys being worn, that team has got a lot of people’s blood down our way pumping faster — has left us utterly unmoved. We don’t like rugby and as I search around for the best way to explain why, I suppose the best I can offer is that we don’t like it because we basically feel that rugby has never liked us. I grew up in the Cork suburb of Togher, about a mile from fabled Musgrave Park. I knew it only as a venue with rather large goal posts and a nice looking stand. It was somewhere we walked past on our way to watch bad League of Ireland matches at Turner’s Cross, gazing at it without ever actually figuring to go in there.
When I was 11, Ireland won the Triple Crown. When I was 14, Ireland won the Triple Crown again. I vividly remember Ciaran Fitzgerald asking, “Where’s your bleeping pride?” and jumping out of the seat when Ginger McLoughlin engineered that pushover try. And one of the little thrills of my adolescent life was buying a pair of soccer boots in a sports shop owned by the family of winger Moss Finn. For a couple of months during several of those winters, we rustled up a rugby ball and played a version of tip rugby around our square, trying our best to ape the players we had suddenly got to know on television. Once the initial novelty wore off, though, we returned to our staples of soccer, Gaelic football and hurling and scarcely touched an oval ball again. Like our annual interest in Wimbledon and the Dublin Horse Show, even its allure as a TV spectacle waned as we got older.
And that really is my problem with rugby. Its exclusive nature meant tens of thousands of Irish youngsters were never given a proper opportunity to play the game. On the street where I lived, GAA, soccer, boxing, cycling and athletic clubs knocked on the doors recruiting us to their colors and we were thankful that they did so. We could have walked down to Musgrave Park to play there, too, if anybody ever thought of asking us. They never ever did. The first time we saw the inside of the most legendary rugby stadium in our hometown it was when we were queueing up to get into a teenagers’ disco in one of the clubhouses. Even in the twilight of a Saturday night, we could see that it was a lot more dilapidated than we imagined.
In any case, when Irish rugby went through the bad times in the mid-1980s and for much of the ’90s, it used to make me laugh to read officials lamenting the small size of the talent pool available. In working-class areas all over Ireland, there were gifted youngsters who might have been good at the game. If only they’d been given a chance. If only they went to a rugby school. Imagine Roy Keane playing flanker for Ireland with one of those skull caps on his fearsome head and you get the picture. Worse again were the articles in those days pointing out that while the Australia and New Zealand rugby unions were regularly stuck for money because they were investing it in promoting the game, the IRFU were cash rich.
Of course, just to prove I’m not bitter, and in the spirit of acknowledging that rugby has now sought to broaden their recruitment base, I spent the hours before Ireland versus Australia last Saturday morning in one of the more storied Cork rugby locations, the training pitches of Presentation Brothers’ College. Up there with the great rugby academies in the country, a group of the school’s coaches were running scrimmage games as a way of introducing their first-year students to the sport. I learned that rugby shares one characteristic with Gaelic games and soccer. Its health is purely based on the work put in at grassroots level by selfless coaches patiently teaching the skills to enthusiastic kids. And one of those kids they were teaching is my first cousin Craig. According to all available genealogical research, he is the first member of my extended family to ever play rugby. I think that’s called some kind of progress.