Henry Kissinger was once asked if his monumental treatise, The Art of Diplomacy, was a great book - and he replied modestly that he was not sure, but that anyone who completes it will be a great reader. And it is so with Edmund Van Esbeck's remarkable treatise on 125 years of Irish rugby. In his acknowledgments he cites his family's contribution to the compilation of facts and figures, and to this I must add my own thanks. We are all in their debt.
The important thing about this book is that it is so evident the writer loves the game of rugby football - its past, its present, its warp, its weft, the romance of success, and the sadness of failure. Importantly, he views its future with a mixture of apprehension and anticipation.
He chronicles fairly the ups and downs of an amateur game (for which I think he secretly still hankers), and sees its move to professionalism as inevitable, but charged with potential difficulty.
Each player, international or not, will delve into the book for his own particular period. He will not be disappointed, and Van Esbeck has the good sense to break the years down into periods of success or qualified failure. The twin peaks of our triple crown years are proudly told, but the other periods of Welsh or French ascension, English domination, or Scottish hubris are dealt with in full and fair fashion.
There are hundreds of great players mentioned, and it would be invidious to name the best or the worst. That is the stuff for the after-match debate and the glory of the game. But what the book does is to reassure, and yet question the reason why the game is so important to so many.
It says, and I agree, that the game is and will remain amateur, and that the ethos and the rules of the game must reflect this. This is not a mass game that can sustain mass professionalism. Less than 2 per cent of all the players will ever make a living from it, and even then, possibly for only a short time, and so the importance of the game allowing one to make a career, while at the same time catering for a high standard of recreational rugby, is paramount.
This thread goes firmly through the entire book, best summed up by his final paragraph which poses the question: what is the game about? - and he answers it in poetic fashion. "It is about the thrill the youngster gets when he holds the rugby ball for the first time seeking to emulate his heroes, and as he grows old still delights in watching from the touchline and talking of days when he first came to terms with the intricacies on an odd-shaped ball. The fascination has never left any of us, whether we are distinguished former internationals or never more than extras in the cast. To many, rugby football is something very special. It is, and has been, an essential part of the fabric of life of so many in Ireland. They are all players in the story of Irish rugby. This book in essence, is about them."
This is a beautiful summary of a lifelong affection. Ernest Hemingway defined courage as "grace under pressure", and Rudyard Kipling in his poem `If' said, "If you can meet with triumph and disaster and treat those two imposters just the same . . . Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it, and - which is more - you'll be a Man my son!" I suspect that Hemingway and Kipling were rugger men at heart. They would have approved of Edmund's book. Tony O'Reilly was capped for Ireland 29 times and was a member of the winning Brit- ish Lions tour of South Africa in 1955 and of the tour of New Zealand and Australia in 1959