There’s a theory, or at least there used to be, to explain why certain former British colonies, specifically India and Pakistan, chose cricket as their main course from the imperial sports menu while others, including this one, preferred rugby. I can’t remember how it explained the likes of Australia and South Africa, which somehow embraced both: something to do with their multi-ethnic emigrant populations, perhaps.
As for the sub-continent, the suggestion was that cricket was more amenable to the caste system, allowing people of different social groups to play together without getting physically close. There was no such reserve in the Irish mentality which thrived on rugby’s bodily contact.
As usual, James Joyce expressed the dichotomy most succinctly, or had Leopold Bloom do it for him. Passing Trinity College park on a sunny afternoon in June 1904, Bloom observes: "Cricket weather. Sit around under sunshades. Over after over. Out. They can't play it here. Duck for six wickets [...] Donnybrook fair more in their line. And the skulls we were a-cracking when McCarthy took the floor."
All right, Joyce makes no overt reference to rugby (McCarthy was an Enniscorthy brawler, commemorated in song). But in mentioning both Donnybrook and assault, all he’s missing is the ball.
A later commentator, Eamon de Valera, was more explicit. He thought that, alongside hurling, rugby was the sport closest to the national spirit. And he was himself so handy at it that, around the time of Bloom’s critique, he was almost picked for Ireland, at full-back.
Later, as taoiseach and president, he voluntarily exiled himself from the garrison game. Addressing past-pupils of his old school, Blackrock College, in 1957, he told them he hadn’t been been to a rugby match since 1913, for fear of political consequences.
But he remained unrepentant in his belief that it best suited the Irish psyche. “If all our young men played [it],” he said, “not only would be beat England and Wales, but France and the whole lot of them together.”
De Valera would not have been surprised by Saturday’s victory over the French, clearly. But it’s a moot point whether he or Leopold Bloom would have been the more astonished when, 48 hours later, an Irish cricket team beat one of that game’s traditional greats.
So much for the either/or theory. Maybe it holds good for explaining why India and Pakistan still avoid rugby. Ireland, however, seems to have become belatedly adept at both disciplines.
In the process, sports fans here are having to get used to some strange new emotions. It’s weird enough that Ireland should beat the West Indies at cricket. That it wasn’t a total shock, however, is paradoxically even odder.
The Windies have fallen a long way from the era of Walsh and Ambrose. Then it was unthinkable that we might one day feel sorry for them, as I did earlier this week. We even seem to have taken over their mantle as having the most colourful supporters. The one regrettable part of Ireland’s rise as a cricket power is that it coincides with an age when leprechaun suits are so easily available, even in New Zealand.
It’s not quite so strange that we were expected to beat France at rugby. It was the seeming inevitability of Saturday’s victory that was new.
I think it may have been the first Ireland-France game wherein, except on behalf of Johnny Sexton’s head, I didn’t experience fear about what the French might do to us. This time, in inversion of the traditional relationship, it was the visitors who had reason to be nervous about Dublin in the spring-time.
Speaking of Spring-time, watching yet another clinical execution of an Irish game plan, my mind went back to the fate of another famous former politician from Munster, who did play full-back for Ireland, briefly, and has been forever after remembered for dropping a ball in front of his own posts.
So mistake-free have latter-day Irish rugby performances become that such a mistake is unthinkable now.
The only conspicuous ball-dropping incident of the weekend was in the cricket. And even there, it was so unacceptable to the Irish bowler deprived of a wicket that he expressed his anger in language that cost him a heavy fine. But the fine apart, it didn’t matter. Ireland still won comfortably, and among those who proved Leopold Bloom wrong was a batsman named Joyce, who scored 84 runs. @FrankmcnallyIT