A Six Nations title has all the allure of an O’Byrne Cup victory.
Scotland - pub team. Two club teams. Nobody there cares about rugby.
Italy - pub team. Two club teams. Nobody there cares about rugby.
France - worst French team in living memory. Club is King for those lads.
Wales - half the population of Ireland.
England - private club owners rule the roost. As with France.
Yet it’s heralded as some sort of amazing mythical achievement to win that tournament on points difference?
200 countries around the globe play football - we still managed to reach a quarter final. Despite finances, resources and everything else being a battle against almost every other nation.
9 countries play rugby football semi seriously - still never got past a quarter final.
It’s laughable. Ewan has called them out for what they are - chokers. Bottlers. Cowards.
I’d agree with you that people are stupid - it causes issues all over the place.
My point would be that this has applied to lots of Irish sports at different times and applies to the rugby now. It’s this sort of media-public bandwagon echo-chamber thing. See Italia '90, Atlanta '96, Munster rugby etc. etc. I can appreciate now that if you hate rugby for other reasons, it’s particularly irritating, but hey at least you get to tell the world that people are stupid.
I’ve been to watch Ireland play Soccer & Rugby once. Both were excuriatingly painful experiences & therefore never repeated. Soccerball & Rugbyball are TV sports. Beauty of that being, both can be turned off when shite.
But it’s a minority sport shoved down your throat because it’s the hobby of some toffs in elevated positions who manage to influence the fickle nature of the Irish people.
The proof is in the pudding that rugby has little interest globally and certainly has little interest at grass roots level in this country.
Up North, it’s only played by the proddies - there’s probably a handful of clubs in Connacht. It has some popularity in places like Limerick and Cork and the posh parts of Dublin and their environs but that’s really the height of it.
There are an awful lot of impressionable roasters in this country resentful of what they are and the manipulative snoots in the country have aggressively targettted them to buy into it which given their fickle nature, they have.
These impressionable roasters continue to live a lie that they are die hards of the game but in reality are blind to what is actually happening.
Profound and analytical posters like the anti-rugby posse can see this and have spoken out against it.
No, my point is they have consistently underachieved in a minority sport and the level of interest and overstating of the game’s importance in this country is contrived through manipulation of the fickle.
I think it’s fair to say that no sporting result has ever mattered to the members of this forum like the result of the Ireland-Argentina Rugby World Cup match.
The Irish rugby team are by and large, a team of grassroots developed players. The Irish soccer over the last 20 years have been, at a guess, 50% UK based players who came up through their clubs academies.
Just because you don’t like Clongowes Wood College doesn’t not make the Irish rugby team grassroots.
1990 when a team of players raised fully in British association football drew their way to the Q Final of the World Cup.
The example of Germany two weeks ago is a good one. Germany as you pointed out utterly dominated possession in that game but Ireland snuck a goal. This is not possible in rugby football.
Ewan and the boys are deluding themselves. Why they are attacking rugby I don’t know. It used to be the GAA solely when the rugby team were doing crap and the FAI were only able to play games in Ireland because of the IRFU’s grassroots funded stadium which they rented at a low rate.