Monday, April 19, 2010
PROBABLY not the week to invoke the atmosphere, even in jest, but here we like to mix it up a little.
You know our form, lo these many years.
Any week that sees Whitney Houston taking the ferry across the Irish Sea, rather than a gold-plated magic carpet drawn by a brawny chorus-line singing the songs of Judy Garland, has got to be a funny week for travel.
With all of that Icelandic volcanic ash still in the sky dimming the lights – getting the planet in the mood like some Marvin Gaye and a little cheap white wine – anyone considering a long journey would therefore be forgiven for taking their time to weigh up the pros and cons.
But there are long journeys and long journeys.
Consider this: Galway is the closest away venue Munster supporters can travel to, and it’s pretty close if you live in Clare or Limerick. You’d have imagined a few more of them would have made the trip than those we saw yesterday on the fringes of the dog-track in the west or, even worse, keeping this correspondent away from the bar counter in the main stand (relax, we were gasping for caffeine).
It’s doubtful that even the most energetic booster of the City of the Tribes would suggest the nooks and crannies of Dominic Street and environs could ever be mistaken for the Old Town in San Sebastian, but on the other hand, you don’t have to book a ferry to get to Galway.
You’re only an hour or two away, depending on your point of origin, and you don’t need a smattering of Euskara to make yourself understood in the bars on Shop Street.
Most of them, anyway.
And it’s pity there weren’t more Munster supporters on hand, because while it could be a six marker for any Munster fan in years to come to name the backline, in particular, which took the field in red at the Sportsground yesterday, there was more at stake than gathering trumps for future bar-room wagers.
Some heavy-handed comparisons have been made between the age profiles of the Munster and Leinster squadsrecently, most of them to theadvantage of the eastern province. Keith Earls, for instance, though a Lion and fully-fledged international, seems relatively outnumbered by his contemporaries with similarqualifications behind the Leinster scrum – the likes of Rob Kearney, Luke Fitzgerald and Jonny Sexton.
With that in mind players such as Deasy, Zebo, Gleeson, Barnes and Cusack represent the future for Munster (even though at a glance it looks like the line-up for a boy band, as though Louis Walsh was handing out contracts in the Munster Academy). It seems odd that, judging by the numbers present in Galway, a lot of the people fretting about their accommodation in San Sebastian and where to go for their pre-match drinks against Biarritz Olympique weren’t on hand to see a potential future Munster backline in operation. They also missed a chance to see Nick Williams swatting opponents aside with extreme prejudice, but if the big New Zealander stays healthy they may see a bit more of that in the very near future. Or not, I guess if James Coughlan has anything to say about it.
Readers will be familiar with Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, a novel about cowboys and conflict, though we prefer its brooding, sinister subtitle: the Evening Redness in the West.
We were thinking of that book yesterday in the Sportsground, but despite Munster’s 18-12 victory, it was less an evening redness than an evening pinkness.
From a Connacht perspective it must have been disappointing not to take advantage of Ulster’s defeat by Glasgow on Friday night, though they had their own heroes in George Naoupu, Gavin Duffy, and Ian Keatley.
From your columnist’s perspective, however, the biggest disappointment was the fact that we didn’t see – or hear – a duel with the potential to match the ‘walk-off’ in Zoolander between Derek and Hansel: when Munster play Connacht, who gets to sing ‘The Fields of Athenry’?
* Contact: mail to: michael.moynihan@examiner.ie; Twitter: MikeMoynihanEx
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