War is over for new kids on the catwalk

TV3 set its stall out on Ireland AM by booking a stylist to select the perfect match outfit. These people know Rugby Country alright.

The centrepiece rig-out didn’t break ground. An

anorak over an Ireland shirt. A €350 anorak, natch. With tweed Peaky Blinders cap and Tommy Bowe shoes thrown in.

But, crucially, not a hint of sheepskin. A line drawn.

Once, on a day like this, we found Tom McGurk loitering in the front row of a deserted cinema, an arthouse subtitled flick playing and Tom bemoaning the disappearance of French matinée idols, the decline of La belle France, the fizz gone from champagne rugby.

Back to studio for Hooky and his fellow war correspondents to confirm the upcoming 80 minutes would bring us closer to complete understanding of human potential. To calibrating mankind’s capacity for bravery.

But TV3 were playing it a small bit cooler. Unusually, there wasn’t a sense we were facing into the apocalypse in Paris.

“Am I terribly naive and wrong to talk about bonus point wins?” wondered Joe Molloy, the loan signing from Off The Ball. “Yes,” clattered Shane Jennings. But there is already a sense that Molloy has done the state of Rugby Country some service. Dialled down hyperbole a notch.

We heard, in recent days, how Joe once took Gilesy’s advice on board and tries to keep himself out of it, to let the experts talk. But also how he’d like to incorporate a touch of Billo’s enthusiasm for asking the layman’s question.

And there is plenty of opportunity to do that in his new posting because, let’s face it, 99% of viewers haven’t the foggiest what’s going on, when the heavy lads are rolling about, let alone can penetrate the scaffold of jargon that is designed to imply something very complicated is unfolding.

You wouldn’t expect TV3 to abandon that pretence overnight. So Joe’s colleagues peppered the afternoon with beachheads and pods and trucks and trailers and told us how James Ryan allowed the cleaners through the gate to smash the poachers.

But when Ronan O’Gara admired Keith Earls’ “incredible CMJ” — a counter-movement jump — Joe, in the spirit of Billo, felt duty bound to make some polite enquiries.

It is, as we might have expected, just a jump.

But in Ballymount, much like Paris, it didn’t really matter what went on all day. Ultimately, Molloy’s first true test would come at the death.

“We were ready for a fairly gloomy 15 minutes…” he admitted, with a hint of the mixed emotions a reporter encounters when a last-minute winner makes the 700 words already written redundant.

And at first the studio appeared to have been sucked of energy, a party booked into a morgue.

But Molloy, like Murray, had the sense to throw it out to the 10.

And having been presented with the gift of an “instantly iconic” moment on their debut, TV3, with O’Gara

conducting, delivered 10 minutes of television to match — summing up the nerve and skill involved without ever inferring Sexton had spent his afternoon in the trenches of the Somme.

“Oh wow, we’re all shaking here. To have the balls to do that. I’m speechless. I’m shaking… It’s quite staggering to watch.”

A nod to the technical and Murray’s pass: “You can see Johnny can kick off of one step, which makes all the

difference.

“He got the ball on the outside to bring it back in. It wasn’t a natural curl. From 42 metres, on a wet pitch. A wet ball, a heavier ball. It’s incredible. It’s really that good.”

Matt Williams boiled beauty out of it. “An extraordinary piece of sport we’ve just seen. You’ll have young kids in the back garden knocking drop goals over sayin ‘I’m Johnny Sexton’.”

And the pair chewed on nature v nurture.

Williams: “I bet he kicked as a kid on Christmas Day. Because that’s what the obsessive people do.”

O’Gara. “It comes down to practice, but you can never get that in practice. So it comes down to, basically, your ticker.”

By now, Rog was producer, editor and floor manager. “There is no other story. That is the only moment that matters today.

“Everyone would be getting up depressed tomorrow morning. Instead, everything is beautiful and all is possible again.”

There was, mind you, another story. Oddly, TV3 ducked the elephant in the room on Saturday.

Whatever your view on it, Rory Best’s attendance at his teammates’ rape trial dominated pre-match chat most places except on TV.

Twitter buzzed with the ‘notmycaptain’ hashtag. Some boycotted coverage of the game.

Maybe it would have been a difficult and dangerous conversation to have live on a sports show.

And a sad reminder that not all is beautiful.