Séamas O'Reilly: The joys of fairweather rugby fandom

Ireland's Mack Hansen (centre) with team-mates after the final whistle in the Rugby World Cup 2023, Pool B match at the Stade de France in Paris, France. Picture date: Saturday September 23, 2023.

There’s a game I like to play whenever I watch rugby.

What I do is pinpoint each on-field action that would kill me dead. 

A tackle that would chop me in half; a shoulder barge that would not merely end my life but cause my spine to burst out of my body and land eight feet away, coiled and fully intact, like a gore-smeared length of bony rope.

I don’t know much about rugby but I watch the Six Nations, and the World Cup, which means I will be watching with interest as Ireland square off with New Zealand in the quarter-final this weekend. 

It is inarguable that a large part, perhaps the majority, of my interest is due to the fact that Ireland is doing so well. 

I am the definition of a fair-weather fan, and the weather has never been fairer.

There is likely nothing I do so often that I understand so little. My lack of knowledge is profound and all-encompassing. 

Some aspects of the game I watch with the guarded puzzlement of a visiting British royal invited to watch an esoteric tribal ritual. 

I shout garbled encouragements to men whose movements I can neither predict nor understand. Far from reducing this experience, it enhances it in many ways.

My mind, free of such trifles like “who that person is” or “what he’s doing, exactly”, takes in each game more like a vibe, a crashing tumult of large men banging into each other without discernible motivation, facing their opponents in rows and lifting each other for reasons unknown. 

Watching rugby, I experience what Alexander Pope called “the eternal sunshine of the spotless mind”, and only occasionally find myself bothered by not knowing what’s going on. 

Most of the time, I convince myself I do know, only to baffle slightly at half-time when pundits insist that much of what I’ve seen the players do was done on purpose.

As with any milieu in which I feel like a trespasser, I have tried to do some grunt work, listening to podcasts or reading more detailed coverage, but it all slides off my hardened, calloused brain and I revert back to simply watching it as a total ignoramus. 

At a time of my life when I am insecure about so many other things, it is nice to feel content in this ignorance. 

Even better, since my English friends here in London don’t know anything about rugby either, my Irishness allows me to slide by as a true fan. 

Some are so ill-informed they have even asked me — me! — what exactly has led to this or that stoppage of play, or which rule has been broken for this or that penalty. 

I’d like to tell you that I would never make something up to maintain the ruse, but I regularly do just that, and regret nothing.

Drop ball, I say, or something about a line-out, confident that no follow-up questions will ensue. They never do.

Watching rugby has proved useful for examining my own prejudices. Growing up in Derry, rugby was not — to put it mildly — part of my social milieu.

If not directly equated with either Britishness or wealth, it was certainly considered adjacent to one or both of those phenomena. 

As a result, everyone I knew was raised in total ignorance of the game, never playing it ourselves or even watching major internationals, which came and went like golf or cycling tournaments; things we were vaguely aware were happening, but which required very little conscious effort to ignore.

We’d spot a big lad we didn’t recognise on, say, Question of Sport, and just presume it was a rugby player, like when you see a young person on Celebrity Big Brother and know they’re a YouTuber.

It’s likely I couldn’t have named a single rugby player until I went to Dublin for college, barring Will Carling (who had been vaguely rumoured to be having an affair with Princess Diana), and Jonah Lomu, (who appeared to be one of the coolest men who’d ever lived, and parlayed his skills on the rugby pitch into some very good Adidas ads which proved this beyond doubt).

For some of my school friends, this ambivalence was a little more pointed. Our PE teacher, Mr Furey, had been a winger for City of Derry RC in the seventies, and entertained idle hopes he would inspire some of us to take the game to heart ourselves.

Two boys in my class came in with notes from their parents saying they wouldn’t play it (or cricket, an even less frequent option) on account of it being a “foreign game”. 

(That said boys had no problem playing football every week — and were fans of Arsenal and Liverpool respectively — and it prompted little self-examination among them).

Mr Furey might have been moved to try by one earlier success. My older brother Shane had played in the first rugby team our school had ever had, which was judged so newsworthy for a Catholic school in Derry that it got a write-up in the Belfast Telegraph.

Shane went on to tog out for City of Derry himself and might have taught me at least some of the rules, but instead, he headed off to university with a newly activated love of rugby, which he nevertheless, has not played since.

My wife, by contrast, was raised in Dublin, where her family watched rugby as commonly as they did soccer and Gaelic games. 

Though she’s not what you might term an active fan, it is rugby which has burrowed into her heart more than any other sport, and to a degree which surprises me still now, fifteen years into our relationship. 

Her enjoyment of the sport seems to be 85% skin-tearing anxiety. 

She stands for the entirety of the game and watches it through her fingers, shrieking, as if treating herself to a showing of an imported video nasty that’s been banned in the European Union since 1983.

At such times, she needs my expert advice. 

Relax, I tell her, sagely. They’re doing the thing. The line-out thing, with the lads. It’ll be grand.