Triumph to warm the Irish cockles
Ireland captain Brian O'Driscoll scores his side's second try against France at Croke Park last night
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HOW’S your heart after that one?
Not only was Ireland’s 30-21 victory over France one of the best Six, or Five, Nations games ever played in Dublin it was one of the best ever contests in any sport played in Croke Park.
Mind you, that would have been scant consolation had Ireland ended up with yet another addition to their burgeoning collection of gallant defeats against France. The notion that the excellence of the performance boded well for a shot at yet another consolatory Triple Crown wouldn’t really have cheered many supporters.
If the Experimental Law Variations had anything to do with making the game such a thriller, we should have had them years ago. And perhaps Declan Kidney is something else we should have had years ago because the way Ireland closed the deal had the fingerprints of the Munster master all over it.
“Any day that an Irish team gets the better of France is a great day and wants to be enjoyed by everybody,” said Kidney. “They needed to be right today, we had to be really sharp. I enjoy watching the French play when I am not playing against them.”
It’s a bit early in the day to be anointing the man as a new Messiah, but at the very least he has put a spring back into the step of a team whose spirit previously seemed to have been dwindling away since the World Cup from Hell.
This was actually Ireland’s finest performance at Croke Park. It was the 2007 England match without the bullshit.
Instead of facing a ragtag and demoralised England team we were facing a French side who showed every time we gave them an opening that they were quite capable of running the ball with dangerous purpose from anywhere on the field. To switch off for the briefest second was to invite disaster, yet Ireland’s substance ultimately trumped France’s style.
Which is not to say that we were without style ourselves.
On a heartwarming day nothing warmed the cockles of that most vital organ more than Brian O’Driscoll’s try. You see, sports fans have felt like we’ve lost the great man recently.
Drico, like Keano, became well enough known for his life, his likes and his looks to become a tabloid staple, as though he were a contestant in some reality television show. He had become one of those sportsmen whose name is familiar to people not quite sure why he’s so famous.
Well, a couple of minutes into the second half, O’Driscoll showed that nothing about him is remotely as interesting as what he does with the ball in hand. A slashing break through a French defence like the one which first put him on the public radar a decade ago was enough to reclaim him for sport. Rumours of his rugby demise have proved to be greatly exaggerated.
His Leinster colleague Jamie Heaslip is showing signs of becoming to loose forwards what O’Driscoll is to three quarters. His superb individual try was the marquee moment but all through the game he was keen to take on the French and lost little by comparison with his opposite number, that most sublime of number eights Imanol Harinordoquy.
Then there was Tommy Bowe, making the break which led to Heaslip’s score one minute and hauling down Sebastien Chabal the next, Paul O’Connell not only leading the pack in typical style but also doing a decent Phillipe Sella impersonation in the build-up to that first try, Rob Kearney absolutely solid at full-back (the last man to catch that much ball in Croke Park was Sean Walsh) and Tomas O’Leary confirming that his family have a special affinity for Jones Road.
France were an odd mixture of the sublime and the ridiculous, sometimes throwing the ball around with sufficient flair to remind you that elan and joie de vivre are words which have no real equivalents in either of our official languages and sometimes giving the worst French display since the battle of Dien Ben Phu. Too often, they provided the sizzle without the steak.
We even got the better of them in the battle of the beards, Marcus Horan’s thoughtful left-wing Sociology lecturer number trumping Chabal’s Barbarian with the head of a Roman emperor under his oxter in a German forest effort.
But to dwell too much on the French shortcomings is to be a churl of colossal proportions. Ireland often approached the Platonic level of performance invoked by those who maintained that there was a different level to which we could move. Their optimism was justified.
Ireland have often been bedevilled by unrealistic expectations, most notably in the World Cup but this performance was good enough to suggest that this year there are no unrealistic expectations.
Kidney and his men will know that anything short of a grand slam will count as a letdown. But, with our traditional bogey laid to rest right at the start of the campaign, 2009 may finally be the great year we’ve suspected Irish rugby had in it.
And if it’s not we’ll always have Croke Park on February 7. Whatever the Irish is for Magnifique, this was it.
