On the whole we tend to be a modest people, but sometimes, Lord, it’s so hard to be humble when you prove to be perfect in not just one but two areas of life. We’re talking pommel horse and rugby here.
And when demonstrations of us being the master race in both disciplines roll into each other on a random November Saturday afternoon, you can’t but let patriotic fervour get the better of you.
Nothing got on the wick of the late but exceedingly great Bill McLaren than rugby fans howling and booing when an opposing player was lining up a penalty or a conversion – “ill-mannered!” – so if Cheslin Kolbe missed that effort two minutes from time that would have made it a one-point game because of the violent rattling of a coal scuttle in front of the telly, then all you can do is apologise. Emotions, sometimes, get the better of us.
Similarly, all you could do was salute RTÉ’s commentary team of Jerry Kelly and Colm Murray for being so generous towards the five men who could have deprived our Rhys McClenaghan of a gold medal, when some of us were – and there is only shame here – quite literally praying that Stephen Nedorscik, Harutyun Merdinyan, Nariman Kurbanov, Ahmad Abu Al Soud and Filip Ude would fall on their arses.
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They didn’t, but they still didn’t do enough to catch our Rhys, who had to sit through it all, the camera glued to his face, like an Oscar-nominee pretending to wish his rivals for the best actor gong all the best.
But he won the gong in the end, a world champion that lad, and RTÉ brought us the BBC chat with him when he was so overcome he couldn’t even speak.
“Oh my God, I actually have tears in my eyes,” said RTÉ’s Darren Frehill. He wasn’t alone. And honest, if you ever told us that one day you’d become weepy over the pommel horse, we’d have said “doctor!”
Darren’s panel of Chloe O’Toole and Andrew Smith were a bit emotional too, which might have led them to speak in a language with which most of us are not familiar. Eg: “There’s a chance you could be deducted for your leg separations, things like that,” said Chloe, while Andrew talked about Triple Russians, Spindles, Magyars and the like. To uneducated ears that sounded a bit like a cocktail menu, but there’s no sporting bandwagon this couch is reluctant to board, especially when it yields gold, so off to Wikipedia we went. Now? There is literally nothing we don’t know about Triple Russians, Spindles, Magyars and the like.
A golden day, then. And not even Joe Molloy wondering out loud if our rugby lads had peaked too soon, the World Cup being a whole 10 months away, could burst our bubble of, well, buoyancy, the one relief being that the BBC didn’t ask Rhys a similar question, the fella already emotional enough.
“Well done Rhys…. but the Olympics are 20 months away, will it be hard to maintain this level of performance until then,” they didn’t, thank the heavens, inquire.
Back on Virgin Media, Joe had asked his panel ahead of the game who was the best team in the world, the number one ranked Ireland or reigning world champions South Africa?
Andrew Trimble: “France.”
Matt Williams: “France.”
Rob Kearney: “France.”
Honest opinions, granted, but they left Joe’s efforts to build this one up as a kind of an interim World Cup final a bit flat, but at least all three of his pundits were hopeful-ish enough to forecast a razor-thin Ireland win.
Spot on, they were too.
Amhrán na bhFiann kicked off in Dublin roughly around the same time it filled the air at the Liverpool Arena, so we had it in stereo, the only hiccup along the way Peter O’Mahony’s fruity suggestions to his South African opponents, caught on the ref’s mic –- eg “go [bleep] yourself” – which left Virgin Media’s Dave McIntyre apologising lest we were offended. Not a bit Dave, we nearly died from the chuckling.
Victory. And Matt was so happy he was prepared to overlook the horror that is that Irish shirt, presumably designed by folk who had ingested a heap of magic mushrooms.
“Ding dong the witch is dead,” he concluded. “Stop telling me Irish teams can’t take on big packs.”
True, that. Rhys took on his own chasing pack too – Nedorscik, Merdinyan, Kurbanov, Al Soud and Ude – and, like the rugby lads, ended up on top of the podium.
The pommel horse and rugby master race, us. But not to boast about it.
