Colin Sheridan: Even I'll miss rugby if game fails to adapt and survive
MARQUEE NAMES: A view of the Official IRFU Hospitality at the Marian College Marquee on Saturday. Picture: INPHO/James Crombie
It’d take a brave or particularly stupid man to dare take aim at the Irish Rugby fraternity this Monday morning. As the adage goes, it’s their world, and the rest of us are working as indentured servants in it, paying extortionate rents and fearing eviction. Number one in the world and slaying all before them, not with the cautious, death-by-a-thousand-cuts dominance of before, but with wild expression and bombast, this Iteration of Ireland is the envy of the (rather small) rugby world. They play with a swagger unbecoming of our staunchly catholic upbringings, making them a team that nobody wants to play and everybody wants to support. Everybody who can afford it, that is. Tickets were going for $1,000 on Saturday, and as the bandwagon rolls towards France and the World Cup this September, new carriages will have to be added. Loving rugby has once become - how shall I say it - de rigeur!
We have, of course, been here before, and more than once. Contemporary Ireland’s love affair with the oval has run parallel with our emergence as a modern, relatively liberal nation. For those of us brought up watching Jim Staples and Simon Geoghegan regularly get hypothermia in Murrayfield in the early nineties, the emergence of rock-star talents like Brian O’Driscoll and Girv the Swerve was novel and exotic. Chicken and egging the Celtic Tiger (rather than truck and trailering it), Ireland and rugby went hand-in-diamond encrusted glove with models and members only night clubs and private schools and after-work pints, all things that existed before, but with much less sex appeal. Unlike Gaelic games and boxing and soccer, you could and still can support the Irish rugby team, no previous experience required. You don’t need to be a seasoned Sundays Well fan or a retired outside centre. Hell no, all you need is a fistful of fifty euro notes, a place to stay in Clonskeagh and a glossary of terms, and you have yourself a tribe, no induction needed. Even a cynic like me dare not deny the appeal of a Six Nations Saturday in Dublin, with or without a ticket, if only to bask in the people watching and gorge on the energy of a town overrun with hope and hubris. It was like The Années folles, but instead of F Scott Fitzgearld and Salvadore Dali drinking absinthe in Parisian speakeasies, you could rub shoulders with Barry Egan and Guggi in the Horseshoe Bar.
