Putting manners on city slickers

SPLAT! When you dive on your first ball in any rugby match you don’t generally expect to come up smeared with sheep droppings.

But this was away to Charleville in the Munster Junior Cup, a competition I had last played in 12 years previously, and it was the bizarre beginning to one of the most bizarre 80 minutes, sorry 100 minutes, of my rugby life.

Quite simply, it is a different type of rugby, a totally different game from the one we were used to and we bottled it.

Afterwards, Charleville cited the remarkable events of the previous day in Thomond Park as the inspiration behind their surprise victory.

And, on reflection, there were certainly some strong similarities.

Watching the Munster game again on video, I was struck by the expressions on the faces of the Gloucester players. They may be eight points clear of the Zurich Premiership and may have genuinely believed they could break Munster's record at the Limerick venue. But, when faced with a rabid Munster, roared on by their gratifyingly rabid fans Gloucester buckled.

Poor Henry Paul looked like a blind man at a cattle prod exhibition until he was mercifully air-lifted to safety early in the second half. His team-mates were similarly shell-shocked, experienced pros overcome by the occasion, location and ferocity of a momentous day in Irish rugby history.

The following morning, we were chatting cheerfully about the game as we drove to what we thought would be a nice run-out against our country brethren.

Leading the seconds league, ahead of such luminaries as Cork Con, Shannon and Garryowen, we believed we'd run up a handy score against our Junior league Division Three opponents. How wrong we were. We togged off in the GAA grounds and drove to the field which, as I quickly discovered, was normally used by sheep with bowel difficulties.

The first 15 minutes went according to plan with plenty of skip passes, loops and slick handling and Charleville, though gamey, appeared to be out of it at 11-3.

But then...well, I don't quite know what happened. The ref started to ping us for everything and the game became a stop start, mishmash of scrums and lineouts. As our frustration increased, so did the home side's confidence and they played like men possessed with raucous touchline support.

God knows how many extra 10 yards we conceded after bitching to the referee, and every time we went back 10, the touch judge would retreat 15, forcing us to align ourselves with him.

My head had gone at this stage and after yet another miscalculation of the distance involved, I told the linesman, rather brusquely, that if he was ever selling land, I was buying. A statement that did nothing to aid our cause.

The whole thing was like a David Lynch movie, the roaring, foaming crowd on the touchline began to resemble the orcs in the Guinness ad as the nervous hurler lines up his match-winning free. Charleville, although down to 13 men, beat us in extra time and 15 Henry Paul's in Dolphin jerseys trooped off the pitch.

Chatting to the Charleville lads afterwards, I found out why they'd won. Every member of the team was from the area, many of them had grown up together and guys were travelling down from places such as Dublin and Wexford to play for their town at weekends.

The relationship with the GAA derived from the fact many also lined out for the hurling team, an encouraging and salutary situation. They played for their town and their mates and it showed.

One game may have been played in front of 14,000, the other before a couple of hundred on a field peppered with sheep shite, but both ourselves and Gloucester learnt a huge lesson last weekend there is great power in the parish.