Article from The (London) Times today:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/sport/rugby_union/article5946900.ece
Ireland grand-slam bid fails to unite nation
For older generations, the prospect of victory in Cardiff today will do little to stir the sporting soul
If you are Irish and you like rugby, you will be loving this entire grand-slam business. The old boys of 1948 getting dusted down and wheeled out. The big claims for rugbyâs centrality to Irish culture. The sense that a grand slam may be one last, grand blowout before the country throws itself down the economic garbage chute.
If you are Irish and indifferent to the rugger hullabaloo, well, you wonât be short of company, either.
This has been an interesting month for Irish sport. For a few days at Cheltenham we masqueraded as the racing Irish, a loveable, all-drinking, all-wagering tribe of codgers pretending that they still had some money left. Here we come clutching a form guide and rosary beads in one hand and a creamy pint in the other. The sport of kings. Itâs in our blood, see.
Tuesday was St Patrickâs Day and Croke Park hosted the All-Ireland club hurling and football finals. If there is a unit of Irish sport that feels itself securely tied to the soul of the nation, it is the GAA.
And then this weekend the stage is boisterously commandeered by the rugby people - big, bluff practitioners of a sport that a rabid RTE commentator asserted a couple of years ago to be the heartbeat of our nation. It was a claim that set many of us sniggering into our skinny cappuccinos. You either love rugby or loathe rugby, but in Ireland it is also possible to ignore it, even in a week such as this.
Rugby is slowly changing its demographic and the success of Munster, in particular, has provided a sort of gateway drug for those who wish to explore matters farther. For many of us, however, it is too late. We grew up in a time when rugby in Dublin and in Ulster was the preserve and the sporting means of self-expression for the privileged classes.
Even in other regions the game was, as the great Irish writer Breandn hEithir put it, distinguished from other popular sports by the fact that it was played by Protestants and by the sons of the small-town businessmen who had been sent to the rugby- playing academies of Blackrock, Castleknock and Clongowes Wood, to ensure that they were kept a cut above the buttermilk that surrounded them at home and to make useful business connections.
Irish rugby remains a sport from which generations of us have felt excluded and disenfranchised. Whatever happens in Wales today, it will be a private function. A large swath of us will be at home watching something else or doing something else, not out of ill will but just because rugby does not concern us or stir us. The game does not still the nation in the way that Ireland football matches in World Cup finals do, clearing those streets that have previously been festooned with flags and bunting. And rugby does not stir that deep, atavistic pride inside us like an All-Ireland hurling final.
Even rugbyâs high feast days leave lots of us cold. I was dispatched to see Ireland play France on the day when Croke Park belatedly opened itself up for business to foreign sports. My journalistic services were not needed for the England game a couple of weeks later, so I went to watch some hurling instead. I am glad my byline did not appear over some of the frothy foolishness that was committed to print and hurled down the airwaves that weekend. Corny, misplaced jingoism was dispensed in industrial quantities by people who should know better.
What a bizarre occasion of self-celebration that was. Rugby people at their hectoring and sanctimonious best, giving hard evidence to the old truth that as a great sporting nation we are merely a race of big-event addicts and international sport comes with the added incentive of giving us the chance to get a pat on the head from elsewhere. We are obsessed with seeing ourselves as others might see us, addicted to pointing out cloyingly our charm and our passion. Arenât we the greatest supporters in the world? Arenât we? Say we are. Puh-leese!
Lawdee! February 2007. What a time we had of it. The business of the Union Jack being run up a flagpole at Croke Park and of God Save the Queen being sung in the old place was held up to us peasantry and a bemused international audience as an example of how things should be done. Our little Mandela-Pienaar moment.
We were asked to stand back and let the rugby folk take care of the healing. The old oppressorsâ anthem had been played and the flag run up and down the timber many times during the Special Olympics at Croke Park a few years earlier and nobody had died of apoplexy, but this, we were told, was our history in the making, the final proof that as a nation we had matured.
The rugby chaps had done it. They had planted the flag on the peak of national adulthood. The final stage of our evolution as a race was complete. We were walking on two feet and with a straight back at last. And wearing blazers with shiny buttons.
Of course, we speak out of both sides of our mouths. Beating our new best friends, the English, at Croke Park was the least that could have been done for the GAA. The chaps had sorted out that nasty old Bloody Sunday business once and for all, given payback for the days when the English took the corn out of our foamy mouths while the spuds rotted in the fields and soothed the seething peasantry who were gathered somewhere else in a parish hall, brandishing cudgels and scythes and baying about the feckinâ Brits being in the good field again.
Cry god for Croker, Ireland and the oval ball, one reporter concluded before passing out in a state of religious ecstasy. There was plenty more guff to the tune of rugby being the heartbeat of our nation and this being a point that divided our history in two. The rest of us expressed our maturity by placing our tongues between our lips and exhaling so as to make farting noises.
But the truth is that all Irish sports need occasional sips of this nationalist soma to sustain themselves. An Ireland win today would be a nice punctuation mark to place at the end of the bizarrely vulgar Celtic Tiger years, but perhaps the real measure of our maturity, as a sporting nation at least, will come when we can play games without the constant need for external validation and self-congratulation.
Meanwhile, good luck to the boys. Some of us will be passionately checking Teletext later to see how ye got on.
Tom Humphries is a columnist for The Irish Times and has twice been nominated for William Hill Sports Book of the Year prize
The grand slam - whatâs in a name?
Try as Declan Kidney might to play down thoughts of a grand slam, it is impossible to divorce Ireland from the rampant expectation that surrounds them today. But from where does the term grand slam originate?
Although Ireland completed a clean sweep in 1948, the term came into being in a rugby context only in 1957. Until then the gold standard was the triple crown and the title itself. In all the reports of Irelandâs success 61 years ago there is not one mention of grand slam.
Uel Titley, the Times correspondent, is credited with first linking rugby with what was common parlance in contract bridge when a bidder wins all 13 tricks. In his preview on the morning of Englandâs international against Scotland on March 16, 1957, he wrote: There is much more than usual at stake for England today in the match against Scotland at Twickenham. The last time when England achieved the grand slam under present conditions was as long ago as the 1927-28 season. They won 16-3.
Titley was an individual fellow, a traditionalist and very much old-school. How he came to be named Uel is bizarre in itself. Apparently, Sam, his father, said that his son could have what was left over from his own Christian name.
Grand slam has since fallen into sporting vernacular, not least in tennis and golf. In rugby the grand slam has been achieved on 34 occasions - by England twelve times, Wales ten, France eight, Scotland three and Ireland one. Wales, England and France have won back-to-back grand slams, but no country has won three in a row.
Earning power: how the class of 2009 compares with Irelands sporting icons
Padraig Harrington, golf
Won the Open and US PGA Championship in 2008, to go with his 2007 Open title. He is No 5 in the world rankings and earned almost 2.5 million euros (now about 2.34 million) in European Tour events last season.
Robbie Keane, football
The Tottenham Hotspur forward, who has scored a record 37 goals for Ireland, was bought from Liverpool for 12 million, a profit of more than 8 million for the North London club, who had sold him to the Anfield club six months before for 20.3 million. Is thought to earn 70,000 a week at White Hart Lane.
Brian ODriscoll, rugby union
The Leinster and Ireland centre holds his countrys tryscoring record with 35. The national teams captain is believed to earn 400,000 euros a year.
Ruby Walsh, horse racing
The 29-year-old jockey from Co Kildare won the Grand National when he was 20 and triumphed again in 2005. He has twice won the Cheltenham Gold Cup on Kauto Star. His 215 rides this season have won 3.6 million, of which Walsh will get a substantial percentage, as well as 150 per race.
Sen g hAilpn, hurling
Fiji-born player who has won three All-Ireland titles with Cork and was RTEs Sports Person of the Year in 2005. Although an amateur, he has tipped as the first hurler to earn 100,000 euros a year in endorsements and associated earnings.
Sean Cavanagh, Gaelic football
The leading scorer for Tyrone, who won the Senior All-Ireland Championship in 2008. He is captain of Irelands International Rules team and last years player of the year. Even the best Gaelic Athletic Association players do not earn more than 50,000 euros a year and the majority have day jobs.
