Scrum Of The Earth

DID YOU, dear reader, give a good goddamn about what happened to Ireland against Italy on Saturday? No, me neither.
The blanket of feverish anticipation surrounding Saturday s game almost cried out for the gravelly gravitas of Robert Fisk, or the authoritative tones of Michael Buerk, rather than the newsprint utterances of Tony Ward and Neil Francis, such was the urgency to imply that an Irish win would be a development on a par with finding a cure for the common cold.
Ireland must prevail, they yelped, for the sake of the country at large, or human life as we know it will shudder to a grinding halt, and we ll do even worse in the World Cup than we thought.
The preponderance of such articles was incredibly excessive, considering that an Irish win was as predicatble as day following night; as the news following the Angelus, as the Queen Mother not dying this year and as Chelsea avoiding Lazio in the semi-finals of the Cup Winners Cup.
It is safe to assume that had Italy done the dirt on Ireland, Warren Gatland would have been fired on the spot. But there was realistically as little chance of that happening as the next Irish out-half being a binman named Anto from Crumlin, so the idea of attaching so much importance to a piddling little fixture seemed a little weird.
Flicking from channel to channel on Saturday afternoon, Foul Play happened upon the Ireland-Italy game live on RTE, glanced at the top left-hand corner of the screen for confirmation that our boys were giving the Eyeties a damn good whacking, and absently noted the following text: Ireland 8-23 Italy .
For a second, I wondered if my eyes were not accidentally misplacing the position of the hyphen in the scoreline 8-23 , rather like the London newspaper editor who famously misread England 0 USA 1 as England 10 USA 1 during the 1950 World Cup finals. Yet, a final winning margin of just nine points seems about right, in terms of what it tells us about Ireland s rank in the firmament of world rugby.
Italy, on all the available evidence, cannot hit snow off a rope these days. They recently conceded sixty points to a Welsh side for whom the term extraordinary only in their sheer ordinariness was invented so at least there is one shower of losers in the northern hemisphere whom Ireland will be able to rely on for their big morale-raising win next season, given that they can t play Wales in Cardiff for another year.
The true rugby connoisseur hip-flask in pocket, copy of The Irish Times under one beefy forearm, amusing aphorisms for all occasions will have shunned the windswept, half-deserted terraces of Lansdowne Road last weekend, instead opting for the BBC s coverage of France v Scotland in Paris.
An awesome 55 points were on the board by half-time, 33 of them to Scotland, who were quite unrecognisable in the way they . . . eh . . . threw the ball to each other, won it at line-outs, and scored tries and kicked conversions.
Curiously enough, Scotland s footballers also gave their best performance in years when they played at the Stade de France, against Brazil in the World Cup last June, so perhaps there is something in the air around northern Paris conducive to the Hibernian warrior mentality. This theory assumes even more plausibility when you take into account that the Stade de France is built on the site of a disused gasworks.
There must certainly have been some dubious fumes wafting across the nostrils of Scotland s goalkicker, Kenny Logan, when he missed the easiest conversion of all time in the first half, somehow contriving to shoot wide from squarely in front of the posts twenty yards out.
The second half yielded just one Scottish penalty and nothing by France, with both teams settling back into a kind of post-coital repose, as if immobilised by the enormity of what they had just taken part in.
To describe France s performances this season as piss-poor would be a grievous affront to the contents of toilet bowls everywhere. Amazingly, they have claimed the Wooden Spoon and sit below Ireland in the Five Nations table, having given away more points in their last three games than in the previous two years combined.
Some of the more loony-tunes commentators in France are calling it The Curse of Nike , who began manufacturing the team s strip this season. And who makes Ireland s kit? I ll give you three guesses and the first two don t count.
They were unfortunate to lose their best player, Castaignhde, in the opening minutes through injury; but being deprived of an out-half, however talented, does not explain the Gobi Desert-sized holes which began appearing in the French backline as Glenn Metcalfe and Alan Tait stormed through again and again, or the pack s unbelievable incompetence, which culminated in skipper Rafael Ibanez being stamped on by one of his own flankers.
When they defeated Ireland by a point back in February, we all wrote it off as a triumph for superior experience over unrefined enthusiasm, even if that diagnosis bore scant relation to the reality of the events on the field. Now we know that they merely made Ireland look good, because they were fielding their worst team in years and none of us knew it at the time.
A morale-boosting friendly between these two sleeping giants of world rugby beckons. But not at the Stade de France, hopefully. Some things never change. n