This was our moment...

AFTER years of frustration, under-achievement, near misses and calamitous failure at the World Cup, Saturday’s quarter-final offered the perfect opportunity to rewrite history and set the record straight.

If the English and the Welsh, the French and even the Scots could make a semi-final of a World Cup then how come Ireland have never made it through to the last four?

If it was ever going to happen, the contest against Wales back here in Wellington, where Ireland’s World Cup journey started against the same opposition in 1987, provided the perfect symmetry. The venue offered the only change as Wellington’s famed Athletic Park is no more. I searched in vain for that historic cathedral of rugby the other day only to be told that the iconic stadium, where the famed Millard Stand used to sway when the notorious Wellington swells rolled up from the Antarctic, is no more. The property moguls swallowed it whole — something we can readily identify with back in Ireland — and in its place stands a retirement village.