I met a guy recently who went to a posh school in England, went “up” to Oxford and got a double first and got a job in the sort of broking house in London that was once seen as the epitome of upper class high life, but is now being portrayed as the root of all the world’s troubles. He told me that when he lived in London, he would entertain clients in the sort of restaurants were the portions were tiny and the bills massive. At 9pm he would make his excuses and pretend that he had an art opening to get to. But actually he was sneaking off to his secret pleasure: Dog racing at Walthamstow greyhound track. “Chav horse racing” he calls it. He had to don an old anorak and roughen up the edges of his polished accent just to fit it.
Well I feel that way about Rugby, except in reverse. Rugby Union is a posh sport, despite what people in Limerick will tell you. As a general rule of thumb (and this applies as much in New Zealand and Australia as it does in Ireland), Rugby is played in schools that charge fees while Football, of varying codes, is played in schools that don’t. My school was firmly in the non fee paying camp. The only way most people in my school could have afforded to pay for education was if they robbed a bank, a trade many of them later went into.
So I played Gaelic Football and Hurling at school. During break time we would play 30 a-side games of soccer in the yard with a tennis ball and duffle coats for goals. Rugby only intruded on our lives a couple of times a year when the state television service would broadcast the games in that years five nation’s championship. We watched because we were so starved of live sport that we’d watch anything (I spent many happy hours watching wrestling for example). We didn’t really pass much notice as the rules seemed convoluted and Ireland were crap.
I did play three games when I was ten after the local Rugby club decided to go all liberal and invite the poor schools into the local inter schools competition. We played our first game against one of the other poor schools. After a whistle dominated affair that contained two hundred penalties and one successful pass, we beat each other into a 0-0 draw. We lost the next match 4-0, after our full-back thought tripping their winger would be easier than tackling him and we conceded a penalty try. The unfairness of that decision still pains me as we assumed the ref would make them kick at the posts and the previous two hours proved that no one from our schools could kick one of those funny shaped balls more than two feet in the air.
In our final match, we played the local Grammar school and they spanked us 57-0. My career thus ended. Played three, lost two, drew one. For 0, against 61. That was in the 1970’s and only Manchester United had a worse sporting record back then.
Afterwards, I was happy to leave Rugby to people with money and odd shaped balls. My roots were solidly working class and I had enough real sport to keep me happy. In the 90’s however, I decided to class up and started hanging out with people who knew how to pronounce ‘th’ and who got out of the bath when they wanted to go for a pee. Not being one to start at the bottom, my first match was the World Cup Final at Twickenham in 1991. My ex girlfriend managed to score eleven tickets for the game (she probably slept with somebody for them, but the less said about that the better) and we distributed as many as we could to Australian friends. We didn’t know many Aussies then and I was damned if I was going to give any to English people. So if you watch an old video of that game, you might notice seven empty seats in the West Stand.
To my great annoyance I was hooked. I started sneaking into club games and even took part in a sevens competition, where in tribute to my school history, my team yet again failed to trouble the scorer. With the passion of a convert, I threw myself into the rules and studied the differences in style between the Northern and Southern Hemispheres. All to no avail unfortunately, as it became clear to me that only a tiny proportion of the people who watch Rugby actually understand it.
They certainly don’t understand it here in Melbourne, but then again they don’t watch it either. This place is a desert for Australian Rugby Union, never mind the European Six Nations stuff that I favour. So we diehards are forced to fork out for Setanta Sports and subscription TV. That’s bad enough but the games tend to start at 4.30am as well. As somebody who struggles to get up for work during the week, this has provided a real challenge during this campaign. However, success provides its own stimulus and Ireland’s performances this year made it increasingly easy for me to get out of bed early on Sunday mornings.
That was capped off this morning when Ronan O’Gara finally broke a sixty one year old hoodoo and Ireland won the Grand Slam. In the great tradition of sport, we almost threw it away in the end when Wales kicked a penalty that would have won them the game. Thankfully the kick fell short and I leaped from my early morning sofa to punch the air and do a self conscious jig of delight. In the process I stood on the remote control and turned the TV off. Thus I missed the final few seconds of Ireland’s historic season.
Outside, the sun was rising above St Kilda and I walked down to the pier to watch the City wake up. Nobody seemed to notice that an historic sporting event had happened on the other side of the world. But that was fine with me. Rugby is my guilty secret and that’s the way I want to keep it.
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