Colin Sheridan: After the peak years, is rugby slowly sinking?

Were the sepia-tinted days of Simon Geoghegan, living off a paltry two passes a season but still managing to round Tony Underwood, somehow better in their authenticity, their romance, their innocence?

HALCYON DAYS: 'The peak of professional rugby's first age, the halcyon days of O’Gara, O’Connell and O’Driscoll, of Munster and early Leinster, was a rush of adrenaline for a generation of people keen for a post-millennial fix'. File pic: Brendan Moran/Sportsfile

It’s 27 years since World Rugby Chairman, Vernon Pugh, declared rugby union an “open game”, and so began the professional era. Since that declaration, the game of rugby has bobbed along, ebbing and flowing, reaching a level of popularity in some countries - Ireland - that made it a marketer's dream, while in others, particularly Australia, it has flirted with near extinction. 

Even its most cynical detractors have likely been swept along at one time or another by the momentum of goodwill its more profound moments have inspired, particularly in its formative years of professionalism - O’Driscoll’s hat trick in Paris, the O'Gara drop goal in Cardiff, Munster’s ascension to the apex of European rugby, Leinster eventually bettering them. All of these memories are linked by our insatiable need as a country and people to be taken seriously.