A confession. On Friday morning, I toddled down to the local bookies and stuck €200 on Ireland to beat Australia in the first International Rules test. Considering Ireland's recent lack of success in the series, the 6/4 odds struck me as being a mite niggardly, but I put the bet on all the same. You see, I wouldn't have been able to summon up any interest in the game whatsoever without having a financial incentive.

The faith of my fathers might have gone by the wayside a while back, but I have retained a Catholic taste in sports. There is almost nothing which cannot draw me in if I happen upon it while flicking through the channels. Truck racing, bowls, weightlifting, biathlon, water polo, have all engaged my emotions over the years. But I just can't get it together for international rules anymore.

It is the singular achievement of the promoters of this game to have produced perhaps the most boring field sport in the world, something which resembles nothing so much as one of those weird animal hybrids which are an insult to the noble species involved. International rules has all the grace and beauty of a cross between a zebra and a donkey. It is the zonkey of sports and you'd have to be a zebrass to take it seriously. It possess all the excitement of curling, the dignity of professional wrestling and the profundity of pro-celebrity golf.

So, while I'm extremely grateful to the Irish team for enabling me to make a few bob in these recessionary times, this seems like the best time to point out the naked nature of the emperor who cavorted listlessly across the Subiaco Stadium in Perth on Friday morning. The negative coverage the series has received in recent years has been put down to sour grapes on the part of disgruntled Irish pundits and supporters. But even after Ireland held out for a narrow win on Friday, the game seems as unlovable as ever.

Perhaps there has been an element of ill grace in defeat, in the litany of complaints which have followed recent Australian victories. That small percentage of the Aussie public who pass heed on this compromise game can't have helped noticing that a victory for their team is usually followed by threats from the Irish that they'll be taking their ball home and never playing again. It will be interesting, for example, to see if we now have a few declarations that the series is a great thing now that Ireland have managed to become competitive again.

Let's face it, the real story of the last few tests was the wide margin of Australian victory. All the caterwauling about unacceptable levels of violence was just a smokescreen. The change which made the difference this time round, and the one which prompted me to have that Friday flutter, was not the threat of strict penalties on any Aussies crossing the disciplinary line but the limiting of the number of times they could pass the ball by hand.

Anthony Tohill's joke last week that if the Aussies managed to overcome the latest rule changes we'd have to think of new restrictions to impose upon them summed up the weird nature of the series, which is that it is specifically designed to handicap one of the sides. There was an unreal flavour to the first Test. The kicking of most of the Australians, for starters, would disgrace a junior club footballer. Witness the penalty they missed in the first half. Very few decent juvenile players in this country would have made such a poor fist of it. Think of the number of times an Australian player loped forward at half-pace, tentatively hopping the ball before it skewed crazily off his boot.

What is even more striking is that this incompetence seems to infect the Irish players too. There is very little of the kind of skilful football which adorns even the most tepid championship game in Croke Park. When Kieran Donaghy, Leighton Glynn or Sean Cavanagh managed to produce moments of inspiration, it threw the generally mediocre nature of the proceedings into sharp relief. The only time the series made compelling viewing was when, under John O'Keeffe's management, Ireland played high-speed, top-class Gaelic football and swept the Aussies off the pitch. These days the mutant genre just gives us the worst of both worlds.

The bizarre nature of the game turns the logic of football on its head. Irish players adept at gaining possession in tight spaces know that they'll be wrestled to the ground if they do it in international rules. So instead you have the unedifying spectacle of them poking at and dribbling the ball along the ground like inexpert junior soccer players.

The mark, a noble feature of rules which is intended to reward high fielding, has been turned by the Irish into a negative manoeuvre to maintain possession by means of short low passes. When Ireland, in the fourth quarter, persisted in passing the ball backwards to waste time and drew the wrath of the home crowd, it was symptomatic of the upside down world of international rules. What would be bad play in a normal game is good in this distant relation of a proper sport.

Speaking of the mark, it's also notable how little high fielding there is considering that this skill is considered to be one of the glories of both codes, the Australian one especially. The hope used to be expressed that our game would learn something from the interaction with its Antipodean alter ego. Yet a half-way decent game of Gaelic football is infinitely superior to the stuff served up in international rules.

It's easy to see why Mickey Harte is so vehemently opposed to the continuation of this farrago. I'm only an observer, after all, but the Tyrone manager has dedicated his life to the promotion of skilful, exciting, downright beautiful Gaelic football. Watching Friday's match he must have felt like Michelangelo would if he'd returned from his lunchbreak to find that someone had spray-painted obscene graffiti all over the Sistine Chapel frescoes.

Of course there are those who'd say we should celebrate the victory because an Irish team were involved. But, as Brian Lenihan has found out, mindlessly invoking patriotism isn't enough when what's on offer is an insult to people's intelligence.

Sometimes even €200 at 6/4 isn't sufficient compensation.

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