New dawn fades

It has been a rather mixed sporting week for the denizens of this septic isle, what with the round-ballers escaping from the wilds of Eastern Europe with a win and a draw, in stark contrast to the vivid spectacle of the rugger-buggers being savagely broken over England’s knee.

Speaking as someone who would happily have taken six – or even four – points in Euro 2004 Group 10 at the expense of a first Grand Slam in 55 years if I’d had any say in the matter, I must come clean and admit that, on my own personal scale of anguish, Ireland’s 42-6 mauling at Lansdowne Road registered somewhere between the mildly disappointing and the non-existent.

It mattered a hell of a lot more to those standing around me, as I watched it with them in a stiflingly hot Dublin 4 hostelry. The place was crammed to the ceiling with a frightening number of bodies, many of whom were ticketless English fans. Any fire safety officers who happened to be strolling down Haddington Road would have had a field day.

There was only one television screen in the room. When you’re 5ft 8ins, you’re usually on a hiding to nothing in these situations, and so it proved, as I languished miserably behind a man with a head even bigger than Martin Johnson’s, standing on tiptoe and craning my neck so vigorously that it had a painful crick in it the next morning. And yet still I could only see about 17% of the screen at any given moment, and it was usually a different 17% each time.

The view was so restricted that when Ireland went on one of their first-half charges towards the English posts, I was under the impression that they were still deep in their own half, and because of my abysmal vantage point, not to mention the fact that the game itself was unfolding with all the predictability of a Sunday Independent op-ed, there was far better sport to be had by simply observing those around me. One English guy, ginger of hair and massive of stomach, chose to mark each crossing of the Ireland try-line by winding up an Irish bloke standing next to him, until the latter man (who was half his size) eventually snapped and tried to hit him.

Another white-jerseyed member of the red rose brigade, whose hair was so painstakingly lacquered you could have skied down it, kept loudly proclaiming in grandiose terms the sheer wonderfulness of Clive Woodward’s team, player by player, until he was quietly taken aside by a burly Ireland fan and politely asked to shut the fuck up.

As the scoreline mounted, the crush in the pub slowly thinned out, with people starting to leave, and the scene gradually stopped resembling the Black Hole of Calcutta. This was good, and not so good. It was good because I was finally able to squeeze into an area of the room with slightly more lebensraum and find my mates, and it was not so good because the events occurring on-screen had ensured that most of the people left in the pub were England supporters, braying loudly.

In the final stages, while England (players and fans alike) were none-too-subtly taking the piss out of their hosts, I kept turning around to keep an eye on one of my friends, just to see his reaction to the carnage that was unfolding on screen. We will call him “Morgan”, because that is his name. A rugby fanatic who is totally indifferent to football and actively hostile to Gaelic games, he would have had an awful lot of emotion invested in the outcome of this match.

At the precise moment that Dan Luger crossed for England’s fifth try, I swiftly turned around to glance at him. He looked like he’d had a year of bad news in one day. His cheeks were burning bright red, presumably with a mixture of rage and humiliation, and his mouth was set in a grimace of unspeakable misery. His shoulders were slumped to such an extent that they were almost touching each other. His hairline was visibly creeping backwards, centimetre by centimetre.

It was the funniest fucking thing that this writer has witnessed in ages.