Resist the urge to live down to rugby's dismal brand of eejitry
Those of us who experimented with rugby union football in our youth have occasionally been startled by the game's infiltration into what was once hostile, or at least indifferent, territory. While we were leaving it behind, it seemed many were going in the opposite direction, desperate for a bit of the reflected machismo that comes from talking about the hardness of Munster rugby in south Dublin pubs.
There was a time when you could sit on the much-lamented number eight bus on a Saturday afternoon and people would ask you where you were going wearing an Ireland scarf. If you said the rugby, they would assume a vacant, imprecise look and trail off as they tried to make some consoling point. They would then move on to some more comfortable ground such as giving out about the hoodlums gathering outside Dun Laoghaire shopping centre. And that was in what might laughingly be referred to as the rugby heartland.
Nowadays it seems like there aren't too many travelling to support the rugby team on the bus. On Friday, the Irish Independent reported that "demand for slots for private jets at Dublin Airport has soared, to the point that dozens of high-net-worth rugby fans, hoping to use their jets to get to the Ireland-France rugby game, have been turned down."
While it is still newsworthy when the FAI hire a private plane to fly home one of its players who is knee-deep in the massacre of his grandmothers, the rugby crowd have come a long way, preserving the link between the fan and the player by proving, even in this professional age, that they are as rich as any player. It is an important part of the communion.
But rugby appears to be the nation's game and it's ok to go to any lengths to support your team. I refer in particular to the man in Bordeaux last Saturday night dressed as a leprechaun playing the tin whistle. This was a "my country right or wrong moment", because this was clearly my country and this was clearly very, very wrong. I'm afraid it was hard not to admire the industry and physicality of the mighty Georgians that night.
Because, as Chesterton said, my country right or wrong is like saying my mother, drunk or sober. In other words, we must have standards as a country and they are not being kept when a man thinks dressing as a leprechaun and playing the tin whistle along to Ireland's Call is the best way to support his country.
How did we reach a point as we shrugged off post-colonial oppression when dressing as a leprechaun or any other mountainy man became a fine way to demonstrate a proud allegiance to your country? In Bratislava two weeks ago, I encountered two other examples of eejitry in matching leprechaun outfits wandering happily into the ground. The Slovaks are a notoriously racist crowd, but they seemed to have no problem tolerating these Uncle Toms. It was a dark and depressing night.
But rugby has lowered the bar. It is one thing to mythologise Munster rugby, but the recent Heineken adverts in which a group of fellas pushed Doheny and Nesbitt towards the Eiffel Tower seems to be asking us to have dreams unworthy of a high-net-worth rugby fan. Surely there is more to aspire to than belonging to the Doheny and Nesbitt's set or worse, encountering them in Paris?
There certainly seemed to be a few less leprechauns among the high-net-worth fans in Paris on Friday night, probably because they combined the trip with some shopping for the wife, who is equally devastated about Ronan O' Gara's loss of form and the dastardly reporting of the superb French newspaper L'Equipe, but who draws the line at dressing as a leprechaun. Again we see the restraining influence of women in sport.
They will have to experience what the rugby crowd call "the big hits" on television. Rugby now bears more resemblance to professional wrestling than it does to cultured ball games and as such feeds perfectly into a corporate language which cherishes phrases like "the hard yards" and the "gain line". They deal in myth and lies, believing somehow it applies as much to those who watch it as the freakish physical specimens who now play it.
Ireland's imminent departure is surprising because we had been assured that this was a tournament impossible to exit. It is some achievement to go out of a tournament before most people were aware it had begun and the plans of the entire corporate sector are in ruins this weekend.
There is a line in Wag the Dog which kind of captures Irish rugby's strange achievement this weekend. Dustin Hoffman, playing a film producer, and Robert De Niro have created a fake war to distract from a presidential scandal and Hoffman remarks that the president will be a hero because "he brought peace".
"But there wasn't a war," De Niro's character observes to which Hoffman replies, "All the greater accomplishment."
