Mates, dates and some tag rugby too
Either there was somebody extremely popular being waked in the nearby funeral home at the same time every Wednesday evening, the Cork hurlers and footballers were giving away free chocolate cakes to spectators at their training sessions in Páirc Uí Rinn, or something else entirely was going on.
Your columnist’s intrepid investigating skills eventually yielded the truth, once a colleague living nearby was asked. Tag Rugby was drawing them in their hundreds to Templehill, home of Cork Constitution, so nothing would do us only to amble down that direction to see the phenomenon for ourselves.
On the Wednesday we arrived there were various groups warming up, groups consisting of half-a-dozen or so adults tossing rugby balls around ahead of game time, and we found Claudia Long, the local organiser for Tag Rugby Ireland, buzzing around with referees and pitch markers and generally getting people ready for the off. “Cover your ears,” she said, holding up a klaxon. A loud honk and four games of Tag kicked off.
The attractions of the game are immediate and obvious. There are no scrums, obviously, and the virtues of a stern hand-off are unnecessary — as Long points out, the referees are very quick to stamp out any unnecessary roughness, as they call it in American football. The game is both a social and a sociable one: if you’re interested in getting fit without involving yourself in the rigours of full-contact sport, it’s ideal; if you’re interested in meeting people it’s an even better fit.
This is one of the key attractions of Tag Rugby, particularly when, as we are told by the younger cohort of unmarried men on the sports desk, it’s difficult to meet people, where the expression ‘meet people’ is clearly a high-functioning euphemism. With Tag Rugby there’s a ready-made arena in which you can chat to people and get to know them without experiencing, simultaneously, the particular circle of hell that is a nightclub at around 1.47am.
Claudia Long nods when you broach the subject delicately.
“See the referee handling that game,” she says, pointing out into the evening mist. “That’s my husband. We met at tag rugby.”
It’s not just a matter of dandering down with a few mates, either. You don’t need any.
Cannily enough, Tag Rugby organisers cottoned on early enough that whatever about work groups or like-minded friends, the explosion of rugby’s popularity meant there might be a constituency with a new-found interest in the sport who’d a) never played it and b) would be keen on giving it a go but c) didn’t know anyone involved in the sport on the ground, as it were, and d) wouldn’t be so keen on having their skulls corkscrewed down into their shoulders at a scrum. Accordingly, you can register as an individual, not as a group, for Tag Rugby and get assigned to a team of similar friendless types. Or individuals, if you prefer the technical term.
There’s a lesson here for all sports. The airless world of high-performance, top-class athletic competition draws in attention like a black hole, leaving precious little focus left elsewhere when it comes to spectators.
As for prospective participants who can’t give the time to training sessions twice a week, they might as well forget it. Their money is more than welcome when it comes to propping up the focus on their elite colleagues, but they learn quickly to expect the level of attention an elderly spinster receives in a Jane Austen novel.
Rugby in particular suffers a huge drop-off in numbers when it comes to school players who’ve operated at a high standard – many of them are lost to the game entirely once they leave the pressurised schools arena. Tag Rugby is an ideal way to recapture those players, and a lot of other sportspeople looking for an outlet.
The social aspect of sport is something we tend to lose sight of in our focus on the top of the tree, to the detriment of the lower branches of the, er, plant. Rugby seems to have solved the question of involvement with a parallel competition which is exactly as competitive, or not, as you wish. The easy retort is that the most inclusive sport in the country must be five-a-side soccer, but that’s rarely mixed when it comes to gender. Tag Rugby has got it right. Who else has?
* Contact: michael.moynihan@examiner.ie ; Twitter: MikeMoynihanEx
