English-born, Irish-resident and cricket-mad writer CHARLIE CONNELLYwhooped for joy when Ireland bested their former colonial masters on Wednesday. It was the moment he realised he was Irish in his heart
BEING A CRICKET FAN in Ireland can be a lonely experience, especially if, like me, you’re English. With it being a relatively minor sport here and, for some, one loaded with a certain amount of colonial baggage, Wednesday’s extraordinary World Cup victory over England in Bangalore was welcome for many reasons.
Of course it was one of the greatest sporting achievements of all time in any code by any team. If even Australia had come back from 111-5 to overhaul England’s 327-8 it would have been among the most startling comebacks in cricket history, but for it to be Ireland, a team whose role at cricket’s top table is apparently to serve rather than to dine, makes the immensity of the achievement almost incalculable.
The Bangalore heroics also return cricket to the spotlight. The victory over Pakistan in 2007 aside – a win greeted by a reaction that can be summed up as, “Great! . . Wait, we have a cricket team?” – Irish cricket has kept a low profile for the past century or more. In the latter half of the 19th century the sport was huge in Ireland. At one stage Kilkenny alone boasted 50 clubs, and even Valentia, that tiny island on the far fringe of Co Kerry, was home to two teams. Indeed, it was the popularity of cricket that was one of the catalysts for the founding of the GAA.
Yet cricket has a serious legacy and some famous Irish proponents. Samuel Beckett played first-class cricket, and one could argue that Charles Stewart Parnell honed his leadership and diplomacy skills during his formative years as captain of the Wicklow County team. The stubborn intransigence that served him so well in political life was regularly exercised on umpires who dared to give him out leg before wicket, while the fate of the prankster who once went into Parnell’s changing tent while he was batting and filled his shoes with wine remains unknown; he was last seen haring out of the ground hotly pursued by a furious bearded man with red splashes up his trouser legs who was brandishing a cricket bat like a club.
FOR ME, HOWEVER, the most significant outcome of Wednesday's match was my reaction to it. Before moving to Ireland I would come over to visit my girlfriend, in Clontarf, and was delighted to discover that the Irish team played many of their matches at the end of her road. This meant that one of our first dates was my dragging her to Castle Avenue one freezing rain-speckled April day to see Ireland play Nottinghamshire in a 50-over match. The players wore so many sweaters they could barely move, the ball smacked painfully into cold, stinging hands and we shivered on the boundary among a scattering of spectators. But we sat there. All day. And Ireland were hammered.
Despite this unorthodox wooing, Jude somehow thought my moving here permanently to join her was a good idea, and one of the perks of this has been my regular attendance at Ireland matches ever since. I’ve been soaked at an abandoned match against Canada and badly sunburned as part of a full house against Australia. I’ve seen the Kenyan flag fly over Clontarf and once turned up at an empty ground to find I was a week early for a match against Scotland. Eventually I realised that I was probably worrying more about the fortunes of the Irish team than I was about those of the English one I’d followed my whole life, and this was put into sharp focus on Wednesday.
When the Dublin electrician John Mooney creamed a James Anderson full toss to the midwicket boundary late on Wednesday afternoon to clinch one of the most remarkable wins in cricket history I heard a frighteningly high-pitched whooping and realised it was coming from me. I was on my feet, whirling my arms and dancing in a manner that was entirely free of both rhythm and grace.
During the 1980s the British Conservative minister Norman Tebbit mooted a “cricket test” for Asian and West Indian immigrants arriving in England: the mark of their commitment to their new country would be who they supported in the test matches. I had just emphatically passed my own Tebbit test, and the flying colours were predominantly green.
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“You have two sides, one out in the field and one in. Each man that’s in the side that’s in goes out, and when he’s out he comes in and the next man goes in until he’s out. When they are all out the side that’s out comes in and the side that’s been in goes out and tries to get those coming in out. Sometimes you get men still in and not out.
“When a man goes out to go in, the men who are out try to get him out, and when he is out he goes in and the next man in goes out and goes in. There are two men called umpires who stay all out all the time, and they decide when the men who are in are out. When both sides have been in and both sides have been out, including those who are not out, that is the end of the game.”
This is a famous anonymous “description of cricket to a foreigner”, adapted slightly for World Cup Rules, which are more complicated again
