For all the disappointment unleashed by the Rugby World Cup exit on Saturday evening, the campaign was by a distance Ireland’s best showing since the tournament began in 1987.
It was of course frustrating that for the current team, the quarterfinals continued to prove an insurmountable obstacle. But for the first time ever, Ireland were genuine contenders and will in all likelihood see a team from whom little separates them, win this year’s title.
Will the knock-on effect be to divert youngsters towards the oval ball and away from the O’Neill’s football and sliotar?
Such intimations of a threatening new world conditioned some of the responses within the GAA community towards Ireland’s new status, from the aggressive belittling of rugby and jubilation at their defeat to over-wrought anxieties about losing “market share” to the rising tide of a competitor sport.
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Firing the imagination of youngsters is a good start but there are equally issues for rugby in its excessively gladiatorial collisions and parental concerns about concussion.
Maybe it’s the sport’s narrow social base and established stereotypes, but rugby attracts a level of visceral hostility, hugely disproportionate to its represented failings.
Did anyone watching really care that the rugby world is a little thin for a tournament with so many teams? Is it reasonable to expect that a team covering two jurisdictions would insist on the national anthem of one rather than the other and then revile the compromise?
Is it really a rejection of nationhood for rugby supporters to sing a protest song about republican violence?
Why should the eligibility rules for players bother people any more than Fifa’s ancestry provisions, which we have been happy to exploit down the years? After all, someone playing and living in Ireland for a number of years has at least as plausible a claim to represent the country as someone who has just been alerted that their grandmother was born here.
Above all, why get worked up over any of it? If it’s not your cup of tea, put the saucer down.
Rugby’s narrow base is undoubtedly expanding in terms of public interest. Saturday night gave Virgin Media Television its biggest ever audience. It might even do the unthinkable and outrank The Late Late Toy Show in this year’s ratings.
It’s a big progression more than 20 years since the Ireland-England Six Nations finale in Lansdowne Road with both teams going for a Grand Slam, which attracted only the fifth-largest sports broadcast audience for 2003.
The majority of GAA people don’t really get worked up by the threats supposedly posed by other sports, but the advent of the split season has triggered certain anxieties about abandoning traditional championship months and leaving the field open to competitors.
Allowing that the final audit on the new calendar hasn’t yet taken place, it’s difficult to pinpoint where the damage has actually happened. If the All-Irelands were still in September, they would have been tussling for publicity with the rugby matches and although there would have been plenty of room for both, as there was in all such cases until 2015 – by 2019 the All-Irelands had started to shift – there would still be a dilution of profile.
Anyway, it was a core belief of those proposing the spilt season that relinquishing media attention for the weeks in question would be worth it for the life it would breathe back into the GAA’s club activities, involving the vast preponderance of players.
Yes, some counties have been dilatory about utilising the additional weeks but the concept has only been in operation for a couple of years and responses are still evolving.
The GAA has been in a more worrying situation than this before. Thirty-three years ago, at the high point of the Jack Charlton era, Ireland reached the quarterfinals of the Fifa World Cup. On the face of it, that was a far greater challenge than what has happened in recent years with rugby.
A successful national soccer team reaches parts of society inaccessible to both rugby and Gaelic games – a reality conceded by the GAA in 1990. Nonetheless, watching half a million people on the streets of Dublin celebrating the team’s return must have made for uncomfortable viewing on Jones’s Road.
You never say never, but it looks increasingly possible that Irish soccer may not again attain such heights even if things improve on the current gloom. But that doesn’t change the sport’s status as the most played in the country.
In the days of Italia 90, the GAA wasn’t as prepared for the eruption of interest in another sport but it responded, albeit by accident, when Dublin and Meath provided their own epic saga over four matches the following summer. Subsequently, the development of Croke Park captured public imagination and Gaelic games thrived.
The tempo of football and hurling is different – steady and tribal. In other words, there will always be All-Ireland finals but there won’t always be high-profile performances at World Cups.
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To command exceptional public interest, rugby and soccer require a degree of international success that can’t always be guaranteed.
None of this is based on complacency or a view that the GAA is invulnerable. Clearly it has its challenges, ranging from concerns about deciding on the long-term shape of its season to the imminent integration process, to anxiety about the future of football and its apparently inexorable transformation from spectacle to aesthetic black hole.
Croke Park can concentrate on these matters, however, without fretting about losing ground to other sports, simply because of their high-profile involvement in an international tournament.
So, it’s perfectly appropriate and neighbourly to wish them well and commiserate when things don’t work out.
