There is a story told about former Irish rugby player Moss Keane and a run-in he had with a guard. While driving outside Castleisland one day his car slid off the road, performed two somersaults over the ditch and ended up on its roof in the middle of a field. Half an hour later Moss emerged from the car and walking back out onto the road, met a guard who after asking him if he was alright, asked if he had been speeding. The second row checked over his shoulder at the car for a few seconds and turned back to reply “Jesus, I must have been.”
Two things about that story. One, it’s almost certainly not true. Two, can you think of one player in the current Irish setup that could have such a tall tale told about him? There’s a miserable list of Paul O’Connell jokelets doing the rounds on the internet – Superman wears Paul O’Connell pyjamas etc – that is actually a list about 1970’s action movie star Chuck Norris with the name changed. From Moss Keane to Chuck Norris; that’s depressing.
Rugby is the hottest thing in Irish sport at the moment because of the grand slam and successive Heineken Cup wins for Munster and Leinster. But, ironically, in this professional age the players seem more like well-mannered accountants than ever. The glint of madness in the eye is gone out of the post match interviews, replaced by talk of objectives, targets and owning the football. It makes rugby hard to love. This is going to matter when the All Ireland championships become less predictable and Trapattoni’s team starts to fulfil its potential.
It’s then that the cash-strapped Irish fan, down to one bandwagon a year, will make his choice. He’ll return to the sports that really matter, GAA and soccer, with all their troubled characters, heroes and villains and teeth-clenching local rivalries that go back years. He’ll ditch rugby because it sounds like a half day course called ‘Grow your Business’ in the Irish Management Institute, and that reminds him of work.
Remember when rugby gave us roguish madmen like Moss Keane, Peter Clohessy and Willie Duggan. Or artists like Mike Gibson and Tony Ward. That’s gone. The last time an Irish rugby player gave us a bit of crack was when Trevor Brennan waded into the crowd at Toulouse and punched a lippy Ulsterman. He was hung out to dry with the phrase ‘last of a dying breed’.
The new breed is a bit weird. Tommy Bowe tells the story of how they tied up the team bagman in the team hotel in the middle of the night and sent him down in the lift. That’s weird. Donncha O’Callaghan is offered to us as head prankster, bringing ducks into team meetings and thing like that, which might be ok if he had a few pints, but Donncha doesn’t drink. That’s a little weird too.
Declan Kidney is the nicest man in the world, but he’s no Mick Doyle. The poster boys are Ronan O’Gara, Brian O’Driscoll, Paul O’Connell, Brian Kearney and yawn. They are photofit nice guys, in a square-jawed American high-school jock sort of way. Their biographies will have a lot of rugby and very little skidding into fields in north Kerry.
Just compare them to the gallery of heroes and villains in GAA. One of the best footballers in the country, Kerry’s Paul Galvin, actually looks like a pantomime villain, as if he puts on a bit of mascara before togging out to play like the devil. Waterford’s John Mullane is part hurling-genius, part madman on the pitch while his county manager, Davy Fitzgerald, is the most entertaining figure in Irish sport and probably Irish life since Roy Keane decided to stop talking to us.
The soccer crowd have the inscrutable Stephen Ireland, a must-watch Trapattoni, the brooding Andy Reid, and Richard Dunne who always looks like he’s going to cry. This isn’t just the next bandwagon. It’s a soap opera too.
This drama is underpinned by genuine, spittle-flecked rivalries. The Leinster and Munster rugby rivalry looks so lame when you watch Cork and Tipp lighting up a Munster championship, May afternoon in Semple Stadium. I listened in recently as two sports mad friends of mine from north Cork chatted about a year of sporting disappointments. Travelling home in separate cars after losing again in the All Ireland to that shower from Kerry, they both came to the same realisation; they hadn’t felt half as bad on the same road back from Croke Park in May when Leinster beat their ‘beloved’ Muster. As one of them put, “it just wasn’t the same.”
Truth will out when you can barely drive the car because you think you’re going to puke with disappointment. And the truth is that rugby doesn’t really matter to Irish people. It’s neither local enough nor global enough. GAA looks after our deep-seated, local side. Soccer tends to our global ambitions. We know if we qualify for the soccer World Cup we are one of the best sides in the world, unlike the rugby World Cup, where we are basically one of the better sides in the white bits of the former British Empire. That’s a bit Commonwealthy for us, so no thanks. As for the Grand Slam, that rested on us being better than Wales. Lots of places are better than Wales.
Rugby is our social sport, a chance for middle class people to get pissed en masse in Paris. It’s not really about winning. If it’s to mean anything to our national mood, it has to deliver characters living out dramatic tall tales. Instead we get identikit robots achieving targets. The only interesting thing about Irish rugby is the relationship between George Hook and Brent Pope or maybe Tom McGurk’s suits. It’s all in the commentary box. It needs to get onto the pitch. Into the ditch. Like Moss Keane would have done.
