LockerRoom:Caught the end of the Ireland v Scotland game on Saturday, and there was Denis Hickie celebrating the Triple Crown. I drove through the local estate later that evening and there were kids out playing on the green in St Vincent's jerseys and tracksuits. They were playing rugby. It's not a long-term problem for the GAA. I ran the kids over, but the sight of them still haunts me.

First, back to Denis Hickie. Later we'll tie in the kids. Et voila, we'll have made a point.

This column hardly needs to trumpet its inadequacies, prejudices and failings when it comes to rugby, but we kind of like Denis.

Once, at Dublin airport, he came up to me and inquired politely as to why I didn't like rugby. He had the modesty to state who he was and what he worked at, a precaution which might have saved us both some embarrassment.

I defended myself, not too convincingly perhaps, by saying I had nothing against the game itself and could, if pressed, bear to sit still for 80 minutes of rugby on the television. It was just the entire premise of the Irish game and its habit off feeding itself on class structure which I had grown to hate. (Usual note: Yes, it's changing. Yes, Munster are great.)

Denis seemed a little baffled, but he said generously that he knew what I meant about some of the "bullshit" and we shook hands and have never seen each other again.

He seemed like a decent fella though, and one of my little perversions ever since is to keep an eye on what he is doing while completely ignoring everything else going down in the world of Irish eggchasing.

I wished afterwards that I could have explained to him in more detail the depth of the disaffection some of us feel towards Irish rugby. I don't know any other sport on the Irish landscape which divides people so greatly. Rather than rugby being the heartbeat of the nation - or whatever twaddle was being trotted out about it after the England game - I know that a large number of people who I like and respect actually take a pleasure in seeing the Irish rugby team being beaten.

It's not a pleasure that would stand up to meeting those guys as individuals, and it is a prejudice which is constantly challenged by the Irish team's generally open policy with the media, wherein even those of us who are unstirred by it all have learned to identify more with the individuals who play the game then we have the surly cabal which seems to form the heart of the Irish soccer team.

And none of us felt any different after the God Save the Queen thingamajigger in Croker. Just amused at the presumption of the rugby world that because the occasion was special unto them it was special unto the nation.

All that is by the by anyway, because the weekend's rugby reminded me in an odd way of a time long ago before I became devout in my antipathy towards rugby's failings. After Denis Hickie won the Triple Crown I broke the habit of a lifetime and stayed sitting in my chair and just watched the telly.

Wales were playing Italy and it was a calamity. I'm fascinated by what Italy bring to the fusty home countries set-up, but I have a lingering childhood affection for Welsh rugby. Back when I was a kid and there were only three TV channels, you were limited in the range of sporting icons you could take an interest in. Ali. Best. Leeds United, etc.

And Welsh rugby seemed special. Genuinely the heartbeat of a nation. I liked Ireland when Tony Ward was playing. I didn't like England because I was a kneejerk redblood patriot from the time I could run.

I hated Scotland mainly because I don't really give a damn what a Scotsman wears under his kilt and because the Scottish rugby world seemed even more twee than our own. And the French with Rives, Skrela and that little madman Jacques Fouroux? Okay, not bad.

But I liked Wales. Bread of Heaven in Arms Park? Whoa! I'd even marvel at Max Boyce and his big leek. I liked the accents and the JPR sideburns and the sense of adventure. I even liked Rugby Special on winter Sundays when it came from some muddy field in Neath or Pontypridd and great heaving scrums of men who I imagined to be straight up out of the nearest mineshaft did battle in front of packed houses.

I've never quite managed to rid myself of that soft spot for the romance of Welsh rugby and am always surprised by the little spark of interest that the sight of that vivid red jersey sparks in me. Watching them on Saturday was a sad business. It's true they were the victims of some odd refereeing, but who is to say their incompetence wouldn't have secured the defeat anyway.

It seems almost inconceivable that the team which won the Grand Slam just two years ago has fallen apart so quickly and irrevocably. Back then, although Wales seemed a little lightweight, they had adventure and abandon, they'd restructured the debt most of which hung over them because the Millennium stadium was built, and their drastically pared down club system seemed not such a bad thing after all.

The Welsh, though, even in the old days of the three Grand Slams in the 1970s, always seemed to be better losers then they were winners. Winning just re-affirmed their view of themselves as a chosen people. They could be a little unbearable about it. Losing, even on Saturday, brought out the gracious side of their nature.

Since the Grand Slam it's been nothing but misery. Gareth Jenkins seems as overwhelmed by his job as Steve Staunton does by his. Jenkins has delivered a win over Canada and a win over the Pacific Islands as the only successes of his first 10 games.

And that seductive team of 2005? Gavin Henson is gone it seems, mistrusted or injured most of the time. Rugby needed the boost that a good-looking guy who admits to shaving his legs could have given it. Gareth Thomas got chucked out of the captaincy in the wake of that whole Mike Ruddock thing.

And so after a season when there has been more poppycock, nonsense and high falutin' bullshit spoken about rugby and its place in our world, perhaps the real story is that of Wales, the one country among the home nations who derived a genuine sense of wellbeing from success at the sport, the one country who could claim to have built a culture around the sport is in crisis.

The national team and its muddled affairs are just the tip of the iceberg. Professionalism and the mismanagement of the Welsh RFU have hit the game hard. You dip in out of interest to the post-nuclear world of Welsh rugby and it is a vastly changed landscape from that which we watched on those Rugby Special afternoons with Nigel Starmer-Smith and Bill McClaren. The game no longer feeds a people's identity and self-image, it's not woven into the community.

The big lesson for the GAA this spring is not from Croke Park and the anthems, nor does it lie in the mealy-mouthed lack of reciprocation on other issues on which the GAA might have expected some generosity. No, the lesson is in the valleys and in how easily a game which took its place for granted can be banished from the heart in the space of a generation.

The threat is never really from other sports. The pitfalls are as banal as money and mismanagement and not giving kids something to fill their imaginations with.

And those blazers who I might have rolled my eyes at when talking briefly to Denis Hickie a few years ago are damn good at avoiding those pitfalls. We would all watch and learn a thing or two.