EXPATS' VIEW:TOM O'BRIEN arrived at the Green Briar with his 14-year-old son Conor before the England-Scotland match. He would have been there for Italy-France if the wife had let him.
In the Irish pubs of Boston, Setanta charged 20 bucks a head and the truth is that everybody would have paid whatever your woman at the door of the Green Briar had asked.
Tom O’Brien grew up in Mayo, in Louisburgh, before half the town left for Massachusetts. He played for Westport RFC. “We had rooms at the Hotel Westport and we’d change there,” he said.
He came to Boston when Charlie Haughey was taoiseach and was one of the original members of the Irish Wolfhounds, one of the premier rugby teams in America. Whenever people like O’Brien want to to watch a match they go to the Green Briar – the only “real” rugby pub in Boston.
The Green Briar was packed an hour before kick-off, and it would have been even more crowded had not the Wolfhounds had a match in North Carolina.
You would have to go back to 1994, when Jack Charlton’s footballers came to the World Cup, to find a match as anticipated among the diaspora. Every Irish pub in Brighton and Dorchester and Southie and downtown was bursting.
But this was different. It was more than sport. It was about pride. It was about having something back home to talk about that didn’t make you feel like jumping out the window. If Charlton’s squad peaked when the Celtic Tiger was a cub, Declan Kidney’s boys were stepping on to the pitch in Cardiff when the cat was dead and gone, in the grave with romantic Ireland.
“We need this,” Tom O’Brien said, two weeks after a business trip to Dublin, where everyone he met was more disconsolate than he could remember.
It was strangely quiet early. No one sang Ireland’s Call. Everybody tittered at the sight of President Mary McAleese standing next to Prince William. Somebody suggested Princess Anne had borrowed Bono’s glasses. Unlike the crowd, the jokes were thin. People were nervous.
When O’Gara’s first penalty kick hooked left, there was a groan so deep you would have thought he missed on purpose. At the half, everybody was counting the points Ireland should have scored. But O’Driscoll brought them back, as he does all the time. At the Green Briar, in BOD they trust.
Two quick tries and Emmett Dunne, a young man whose accent announces he’s from Laois before he does, was ahead of himself. “We will not lose,” he said. His Zimbabwean pal, Rufaro Gomwe, nodded.
There was a lull and Tom O’Brien said, in a voice that was the opposite of a stage whisper, “Wales cannot score a try against this team.” No one responded to the jinx.
O’Gara’s drop, a thing of great beauty, almost straight up to avoid the block, took forever to come down but even before it did the Green Briar erupted.
In the 78th minute, Tom O’Brien started singing The Fields of Athenry, which, again, was almost inviting disaster. A few souls joined in. Most did not.
“Wales will not score,” Tom O’Brien said. For once in his life, he was right.
When Stephen Jones’s final effort fell short, Peter Best, a Portstewart man, hoisted his two-year-old daughter Tara in the air and hugged her tightly.
Tara Best had sat there through the boisterous scrum that was the Green Briar, all dark curls, mocha skin and almond eyes, a child of mixed cultures that were at this moment one culture, trying to make sense of the mad Irish who surrounded her. When the final whistle blew and her daddy hugged her, Tara Best smiled and she understood as well as any man, as any Irish person; and then she said one word and only one word and the word she said was: “Yes!”
In Sydney all the Irish pubs were packed. After the win Irish fans spilled on to the streets and held up the traffic doing line-outs and scrums. One young Irish visitor said police and bouncers hadn’t a clue what was going on and were confused – they had thought Paddy’s Day was over.