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Eimear Ryan: You'd like the Ireland v England rivalry to mean as much to them

Does the word ‘Stuttgart’ have any resonance for them, the way it does for Irish sports fans?

Thu, 14 Mar, 2024 - 07:10

I’m convinced that every sports fan has a blind spot. No matter how experienced or well-read you are, no matter how long you’ve been a student of the game, there will be a sport that eludes you. For me, it’s rugby. It’s not that I can’t appreciate its thrills and spills, or enjoy the excitement when an unlikely pocket of space opens up and the whole game changes direction. I can recognise its beauty without understanding its subtleties and machinations. It’s just that, as a sport, it’s not legible to me. I don’t understand the positions, the set pieces, why one hit is a foul and another is not. As soon as I think I have it all square in my head, it falls apart like a house of cards.

I bring my GAA goggles to every sporting spectacle I watch, and they have their limitations; they lend themselves better to free-flowing games like soccer and basketball than they do to rugby and its American cousin, NFL. Those oval-ball pursuits are more like chess, and I have never had the patience for chess.

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