TV VIEW:IT WAS in or about two and half hours since the game had ended. "This is a very happy story we're dealing with tonight," said Tom McGurk. Brent Pope nodded enthusiastically. "Correct," said George Hook, "but, like, it's over, it ended at full-time. So now they have to start thinking about next season."
If RTÉ ever okay our proposal and commission Celebrity Mountaineer it’ll be some fun when Tom, Brent and George climb to the top of K2. There’ll be Tom and Brent, hammering their tricolour into the snow, whooping and cheering and high-fiving, when George will point out to the lads that “like, it’s over – we have to start thinking about Everest now”. Before they’d even begun their descent. Which is usually the tricky bit.
The players and supporters of Leinster wouldn’t even have started their descent from cloud nine when George was asking them all to move on after their glorious 19-16 triumph. Some of us, let’s be honest about it, are still struggling to move on from 1916, so it was a futile plea, really.
No more than all the folk who claimed to be in the GPO 93 years ago, in a stamp-buying frenzy that swept the city, every Leinster fan you’ll ever meet from here on in will tell you they were in Edinburgh on Saturday. But they were. “Thirty-six planes left from Dublin,” Tom told his panel, “thirty-six!”
Tom, though, was keen to argue that among those passengers would have been men and women from beyond the pale – well, from beyond Dublin anyway. “This was about Kildare, this was about Meath, about Louth, about Wexford, this is the whole province,” he declared. Brent agreed, the days of Leinster rugby being viewed as “elitist” and “D4-based” were “long gone”, he said.
“I know you’ll accuse me of being grumpy, but,” said George, at which point Tom and Brent donned the look of broken men.
“I left Galway for Dublin this morning . . . I drove across a fair swathe of Leinster . . . the difference between Leinster and Munster . . . well . . . there were no blue flags, you didn’t know Leinster were playing!”
“Let’s look at the tries, Popey,” said a somewhat exasperated McGurkie, ignoring Hookie’s allegation that there were as many blue flags in Kildare, Meath, Louth and Wexford over the weekend as there are on the beaches neighbouring Sellafield.
But Tom wasn’t giving up, returning to the theme soon after. “We are playing mercenaries, this is parishes against the world,” he said. George sat up in his chair and you feared the worst. And you were right to be anxious.
“You keep talking about Kildare, Carlow and all that kind of stuff – it’s slightly a figment of your imagination,” he said.
“It’s NOT,” said Tom. “It IS,” said George.
And on we went. Brent tried to do a Ban Ki-moon, but as both Brent and Ban Ki-moon have discovered some disputes are nigh on unresolvable.
Sky, of course, were oblivious to this debate when they presented live coverage of the game earlier in the day. We noted, incidentally, that that coverage only started half an hour before the final – yesterday’s ‘Survival Sunday!’ build-up began four hours before a ball was kicked. Mind you, they needed four hours to detail Newcastle’s screw-ups in recent years.
Anyway, all the afternoon proved really was that the Irish are Europe’s rugby master race, which we kind of knew any way. Rocky O’Elsom, in particular, took Stuart Barnes’ breath away. “My Lord,” purred the Sky man when Rocky JCB’ed his way through half of Leicester early in the second half.
“Ireland have won every international tournament they’ve been involved in this season: the Six Nations, the Heineken Cup and the Magners League,” said Tom, proudly, later that night. “Yes, but,” said George, so Tom said ‘bye George’.
And it’s goodnight to Newcastle after they failed to Survive Sunday on Sky Sports. “Only the strong survive,” Richard Keyes had told us at the outset, leaving us fearing he was about to break into song.
Richard was positively peeved when he saw the team Manchester United had put out for the game against Hull, one that was actually at full strength except for the absence of Van der Sar, Evra, Ferdinand, Ronaldo, Anderson, Berbatov, Rooney, Giggs, Park, Vidic, Carrick, Scholes, O’Shea, Evans and Tevez – a fact Richard overlooked.
“What about the integrity of the battle,” he asked, stressing that Alex Ferguson owed it to the Premier League to put out his strongest team. (Come Wonderful Wednesday, Richard will be telling us that nothing in the history of Planet Earth matters more than the Champions League).
United won in the end, but it mattered not a jot, Newcastle wouldn’t have scored if they’d stayed in Villa Park until the cows wandered back in the front door.
“Cheer up Alan Shearer, oh what can it mean, to a fat Geordie b*****d and a s***e football team,” sang the Villa fans, who evidently felt their opponents’ pain. Cruel stuff. And now they have to start thinking about next season, as George would insist. Doncaster, Plymouth, Scunthorpe, etc. The Geordies’ world? It will feel “like, it’s over”.
