Smashed and smashed by a master, master class

A NATION, er, awakes.

The country hadn’t been up early this since the good old days of the Celtic Tiger when we didn’t go to bed at all, and we’d make a handy million or two before the breakfast, nothing in our bellies except a ball of crack cocaine and a quick swig of Buck’s Fizz.

As if to underline our fall from grace, Brent Pope predicted a ‘pitch and toss game’, and, his words consoled us, sure, weren’t we reared on pitch and toss, and hopscotch too, and conkers, and to school through the fields, barefooted, with a bag of spuds on our back for the teacher, and maybe even the teacher himself on our back, sure weren’t we subservient back then, beaten down, oppressed, devoid of hope, but, look, stop will you, we were happy. Delirious, I tell you.

“50-50,” was how Pope saw it unfolding. Frankie Sheahan invoked his old Cork Constitution coach Packie Derham to explain that the key to knock-out rugby was “getting it simply right”.

“Ireland to win by four,” concluded Pope. “A one-score match,” said Hook, managing to make consensus sound like dissent. He had a tie on him that last saw duty in Haight-Ashbury during the summer of love. The lovely Ingrid clearly didn’t get up early enough to run the rule over the clobber: come back Roddy Collins, all wardrobe errors are forgiven, if not quite forgotten.

Frankie rolled in with the “one-score match” theory too. How would Warren Gatland address his players before the game, Frankie?

“I want you to smash ‘em, smash ‘em, smash ‘em. And, one more thing, smash ‘em,” his voice so alive with brashness that he might be able to make up for the impending drop in punditry income by taking on some work on the cabaret circuit.

And that was pretty much how it all unfolded. Wales did smash ‘em, smash ‘em, smash ‘em, and, one more thing, smash ‘em – and that was only the first attack, yielding Shane Williams’ try. And Ireland got the death notices, removal at 8am to the Church of Dashed Dreams and Forlorn Hopes, house not one bit private.

By half-time, even George’s tie looked to have withered a touch, though still presenting a clear danger to public health. “You have a player of Jamie Heaslip’s quality taking a ball almost 20 metres inside, and finishes up being pushed out of play,” was one of his emblems of a poor first-half performance.

“A master class by Gatland,” noted Frankie. “Ronan O’Gara hasn’t had a good first-half,” said Pope, prompting Hook to add that “I don’t think he (O’Gara) is controlling this match the way I expected him to.”

There wasn’t exactly a summer of love mood afterwards, either. Frankie upgraded Gatland’s performance to “master, master class”, while Hook, as ever, sought to broaden the matter: “There’s a problem in Ireland. In rugby terms we are atheists. We don’t understand the importance of the open-side flanker. We have shut our eyes for years...if the Irish game is based on big, strong, honest, hard-working sixes and sevens, we will get this type of disappointment.”

Tom McGurk was still talking about the “wonderful, wonderful adventure”, but George was peering into what he called “a half-full, half-empty glass.”

Hook: “The things that were lurking beneath the surface, and that we, all of us, allowed the Australian match to colour our views… and that’s a real worry – this proves that sides who are playing rugby in a more advanced way, out wide, are going to profit in this tournament. “

And, alas, that won’t be us.

Gatland came on and while he didn’t dance on our graves, there was no doubting his delight, and told us he’d enjoy “a couple of bottles of Pinot Noir.”

And so, beaten, oppressed, and repelled, a nation went back to bed.