Sport simply has to be consumed live for us to care

Wednesday morning in a café in Portlaoise and Gordon Matthews, general manager for Rugby League Ireland, is responding to a query as to why people in this country should pay heed to the code’s World Cup which starts tomorrow and sees Ireland taking on Fiji, England and Australia in the obligatory group of death.

Matthews does a decent job of selling his product, mostly by lauding the skill levels of the 13-man game and stressing the lack of stop-start scrums and lineouts that can, at times, make union appear more like a poorly edited collection of short stories rather than one coherent plot, but he signs off his pitch by adding that Irish people love it when our sports come with “a bit of biff”.

A day earlier, Laois footballer Colm Begley bemoaned the lack of physicality in the International Rules Series these days and he was backed up by Geelong’s Mathew Stokes and Brisbane’s Ashley McGrath when they ruminated on the bland fare that passes for a code which used to garner capacity crowds at Croke Park on the back of a physicality that so often spilled over into rancour and downright violence.