Taking pity on the Munster bandwagon boo-boys
He wasn’t talking about a young boy meeting a moyel for readjustment. He didn’t have the obscure initiation rites of the Kikuyu in mind either.
He was talking about that time when you get your team. In England. To support.
Because I wasn’t the compassionate, mature individual I am now, I laughed out loud when he said this and, more seriously, dropped my glass.
I thought it a colossally moronic thing to say at the time and I still do, but the difference now is that I simply feel sorry for the individual in question.
In a similar vein, I regard those who booed, jeered, or made whatever noises they made in Thomond Park last Saturday week in a more benevolent light than you might think.
The great selling point of supporting the Munster rugby team in its glory days, to me, was the fact that you didn’t have to prove your rugby bona fides to get your cheeks up onto the bandwagon.
Au contraire: the ranks of Munster supporters were considerably swollen by people who had never played the game itself but who, crucially, felt welcomed by the other fans.
The fact that many of them were in exactly the same boat in terms of pedigree was beside the point.
True, there was always a rump of people who would probably have preferred a following which remained, numerically, around 1979 interprovincial levels.
Their historical antecedents were the people saying that the likes of Galileo had too much spare time on his hands altogether and weren’t things grand the way they were?
Saying there was a bandwagon is not an insult, much as the touchy beg to disagree. There’s a bandwagon in every sport.
How else do you explain the disparity between league and All-Ireland final attendances? Between the crowds likely to be plying the French motorways next summer and the half-empty Aviva for some of the qualifiers for Euro 2016?
A cynic might say the bill came due for the Munster rugby phenomenon last Saturday night with people breaking protocol and booing or jeering the replacement of Ian Keatley.
On the other hand, you can get a cynic to say anything.
A realist, on the other hand, would point to the incident as the flip side of a coin which became accepted currency when Munster were in their pomp.
Going outside your traditional constituency was a great boon when things were going well; when things aren’t going well, then you find that that isn’t as beneficial.
Mind you, issuing a diktat about R.E.S.P.E.C.T, which Munster Rugby did last week, doesn’t help. Drawing attention to a momentary lapse with heavy-handed instruction is pretty tone-deaf, and merely gives (cliche alert) the oxygen of publicity to a fire that had been rapidly dwindling thanks to the... the hydrogen-oxygen compound of indifference being used to douse interest... what day is it again? Sorry.
The only good thing about the R.E.S.P.E.C.T missive was that it reminded me of a witty tweet, if that’s not a contradiction in terms, about the premiere of the new James Bond film. Below a picture of Daniel Craig et al standing outside a cinema with SPECTRE emblazoned in 20ft letters, someone wrote: “Aretha Franklin doesn’t like misspellings...”
McGregor bang for your buck
Many years ago I sat in a committee room in Dáil Éireann and heard that a vast increase in the number of cars on the road was being blamed on house prices. The logic — from a member of the insurance industry, I think — ran as follows: Young people had jobs but couldn’t buy a house, so they were buying cars much earlier to have something to show for their wages.
I was reminded of this with PSG’s survey of sportspeople and teams, which emerged during the week and underlined UFC fighter Conor McGregor’s attractiveness to the 18-34 age bracket. Consider the following: We are being told that austerity may be a thing of the past, given rising employment and soaring house prices, though I note nobody has as yet admitted to going to New York before Christmas to buy cheap jeans, my own personal litmus test for another boom.
However, given the Dubliner has been fighting in Las Vegas, and to judge by the images beamed back from Nevada a lot of his closest supporters seem to be in their twenties, is following Conor McGregor around the world the way young employed people are getting something to show for their wages?
A 10-year contract for a teenager? Really?
Her legacy has just begun. Retweet to welcome our newest member @candacedasav -> https://t.co/vrBYFICBli #cHILLrun pic.twitter.com/bvmMap541l
— ASICS America (@ASICSamerica) December 18, 2015
A snippet ahead of next year’s Olympics. Yes, that.
I see Candace Hill, an American 16 year-old sprinter, has decided to bypass college athletics as she prepares for the Games. She has an unusual contract with Asics, the running shoe company: The deal is 10 years long and Asics will pay for full tuition for Hill, who is a high achiever academically as well, at any college that admits her, though she will not race for that college.
While US college sport is a byword for corruption and crime in many ways, signing a teenager to a 10-year contract? Everybody cool with that?
Memories of London in the foggy old times
Kudos to Kathryn Schulz for coming up with a better-than-the-usual way of picking some favourite books — she listed the best facts she learned from books she’d read in the last 12 months. In doing so she piqued my interest about several books, but none more than Lauren Redniss’s Thunder & Lightning: Weather Past, Present, Future. Everyone is aware from their Sherlock Holmes books of the London peculiar, the heavy fog that often struck the English capital (or maybe from the on-screen Holmes version, which is now and forever definitively Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce and not Benedict what’s-his-name and the little goblin from the Hobbit movies).
Apparently conditions were so bad as a result of the combination of heavy fog, millions of coal fires and the emissions from factories that trucks ended up in the Thames.
What I didn’t know that sometimes visibility was down to few feet . . . indoors. It meant people at the theatre often couldn’t see the stage and those at home could end up groping their way around a room. Matters improved with legislation in the mid-50s, but if anything is likely to get me out to buy a book, it’s a titbit like that.
