Jordan Larmour joins the game’s galaxy of hat-tricksters

Peter Jackson gets over the gain line, behind the headline

Apart from an aggregate total of more than 300 Test appearances, Tommy Bowe, Keith Earls, Rob Kearney and Andrew Trimble share another common denominator.

Or, to put it another way, Jordan Larmour did something in little more than half an hour last Saturday night which eluded the distinguished quartet.

Larmour scored a hat-trick, Ireland’s first from a full back. It may not have changed the course of rugby history but its splendour evoked memories of an Irish hat-trick that did, Brian O’Driscoll’s in Paris during the inaugural Six Nations season 48 hours after St Patrick’s Day 2000.

In a city where France had swept aside every Irish team for the previous 28 years, O’Driscoll’s nod to the new Millennium shattered French hopes of winning the title.

His triple-try tally deserves to be talked about as long as the game is played.

As luck would have it, I sat in the press box on that blessed Sunday next to a man whose own brand of wizardry still knows no bounds, Gerald Davies.

In The Times the next day, he wrote that O’Driscoll had given “as fine a performance in the centre as any player within recent memory.”

His hat-trick, the first by an Irishman in the Six Nations, was also the first in the championship since Seamus Byrne of Lansdowne on his debut at Murrayfield in 1953.

In addition to O’Driscoll following up his Parisian extravaganza with another against Scotland, there have been only three other instances of Irish hat-tricks in the Six Nations: Rob Henderson in 2001, and CJ Stander and Craig Gilroy in the same match last year, all against Italy.

The fastest belongs to an Englishman with Irish ancestry, Austin Healey — nine minutes from start to finish in Rome, the day before O’Driscoll’s pyrotechnics in Paris. Given half a chance in the coming months, Larmour has shown he has what it takes to beat the lot.

From fake matches to box office showbiz

Twickenham will break all box-office records for an England match on Saturday, the presence of the All Blacks generating more than €10m from ticket sales alone.

The price for the best seats at what is still endearingly referred to as Billy Williams’ old cabbage patch has rocketed to £195 (€223.27). In other words the cost of watching England-New Zealand has more than doubled from £89 (€102) in the four years since the perennial world No. 1 were last in London.

As one of the game’s veteran English powerbrokers puts it: “Financially, this will be the biggest England game of all time, with £9m at least in ticket money. Then you’ve got to factor in revenue from hospitality, car park, sponsorship, and so forth on top of the most expensive tickets for a one-off game.” They are no longer the most expensive. At least one ticket for Ireland-New Zealand next week has gone for three times as much with one UK marketing company claiming to have “recently sold” a seat in Section 104 Row K of the Aviva Stadium for £637 (€730). Others were on offer yesterday at up to £355 (€406.93).

Admission charges will inevitably keep on escalating when the Six Nations comes round. No country has suffered more from the spiralling cost of Test rugby than Wales whose boast of providing the cheapest tickets among the four home countries has long been crushedbeneath the boulders of rampant commercialism. The large blue-collar Welsh following which made the old Cardiff Arms Park sound like a bearpit has long gone, provoking the perennial cry in the wilderness from working men claiming they have been priced out by the corporates. The change in demographic has had a diluting effect on the level of support.

Elsewhere they won’t give a monkeys about that. In rugby there is still no business like All Blacks’ showbusiness, as England will testify this week and Ireland next.

Meanwhile, perhaps it’s just as well that Donald Trump doesn’t know one part of the scrum anatomy from another.

If he did, a blizzard of indignant presidential tweets might have been swirling around in the general direction of Dublin and Cardiff, each one ridiculing the sheer chutzpah of a man now calling for ‘civility’ in politics.

In the dubious event of rugby ever catching on in the US, it will be in spite of Ireland’s return to Chicago last weekend and Wales sending their second team to Washington DC for a phoney fixture against the Springbok reserves. In the circumstances, The Donald would have been tempted to inform their respective unions: “No more fake matches.” The one in Trump’s backyard at the Bobby Kennedy stadium a mile or so from Capitol Hill created so little interest that a week before kick-off, the promoters refused to say how many tickets had been sold, or, more pertinently, how few. That they claimed a crowd of 21,357 raised a few eyebrows.

Despite leaving their big -hitters at home, Wales made the best part of €1m from an otherwise pointless fixture. Ireland will surely have made more from a similar exercise at Soldier Field in front of another half-empty venue.

The old American maxim, attributed to their prototype showman, Phineas T Barnum, about a sucker being born every minute, hardly seemed to apply given the serried ranks of empty seats. Subtract the expats and the suspicion persists that the locals would have been even thinner on the ground.

There has long been a sense of ennui about proclamations that the US will be rugby’s next big thing. When England’s World Cup-winning team of 15 years ago attended an embassy reception in Washington, the wife of a local dignitary inquired: “Say, which one of you guys is David Beck-ham?”

Jones in self-pity mode

Quote from Eddie Jones, the tough-as-old-boots Aussie in self-pity mode facing the Red Rose press after the lucky win over South Africa: “If I stay long enough, you’re going to get me sacked.

“One day you’ll be happy. You’ll come in and say: ‘Fantastic. We’ve got another bloke we can terrorise.’” As a load of old baloney, that takes some beating. Rugby is lucky to have a more sympathetic press than most professional sports.

Morgan’s waiting game proves in vain

Having endured the strangest of experiences last weekend, Luke Morgan could justifiably claim a world first, not that he will be in any rush to make a song-and-dance about it.

Making his debut on the left wing for Wales turned out to be as lonely in its way as the celebrated early Sixties British film about The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner starring Tom Courtenay. In Morgan’s case, it would have been more accurately described as the loneliness of the very short-distance runner.

None of this, it must be said, was of his making. It wasn’t Morgan’s fault he got the ball in his hands for the first time after 65 minutes of a largely-meaningless money-making match against Scotland.

On the same day, another newly-capped wing, George Bridge, made his bow in Japan as a second half sub for New Zealand’s third team, or it might have been their fourths.

The Crusader proceeded to score with his first touch before helping himself to a second. Morgan kept going until the last minute in the hope something would come his way to improve on his metres-run column, estimated by one source at three. Steff Evans had no sooner replaced him than he was given the luxury denied his compatriot – a pass with enough space to make more than three metres.

How ‘Melon’ Jenkins stole the limelight from O’Gara

Gethin Jenkins’ retirement last weekend at the age of almost 38 will have reminded Ronan O’Gara of something he would rather forget — how Ireland’s most decorated of fly-halves found himself cast as the stooge for the Welshman’s finest moment.

It happened during the early exchanges of Wales’ Grand Slam clincher in Cardiff 13 years ago, and O’Gara has recorded it for posterity in all its gory detail.

“After 17 minutes, I was charged down by Gethin Jenkins and he controlled the ball brilliantly to score their first try,” O’Gara wrote in his autobiography. “For an out-half to be charged down is an occupational hazard but you never expect it to happen against a loosehead prop. I never saw him coming. Jenkins dodged my protection, managed to stay on-side and caught me a beaut. He hasn’t stopped thanking me since.” The Welshman, ‘Melon’ to his fellow Lions like O’Gara, and ‘Mr Grumpy’ to his team-mates, took his final bow for the Cardiff Blues last Sunday against Zebre.