Excuse me, but what is going on here? This newspaper was good enough to send me to Lens to watch Ireland play Argentina in the rugby World Cup. Thanks, boss. As a spectacle, it compared badly with watching the onset of rigor mortis. The Irish played with the wit and flair of a liverfluke. We were leading for most of the match, but we all knew we wouldn't win.
Ireland wouldn't have scored a try against a flock of Falklands' sheep, never mind the Pumas. Indeed, the Argentinian team could have left the stadium to reinvade the islands and by the time they got back with Las Malvinas safely in their back pockets, our lads still wouldn't have crossed their goal-line. The one consolation for those of us present during that suet-pudding of a performance in France was that we weren't playing France in France.
I am nothing if not cretinous. Far from this experience - known to brainquacks as aversion therapy - causing me to shy away in horror from rugby, rather like Mrs Lincoln from the theatre, I actually paid to go to London to watch Ireland play England. Do you even begin to understand what paying for anything does to a journalist? In journalese, the past participle of the word "pay" is "pain": and the pluperfect is, "Excuse me, but do you know who I am?"
Flabbergasted
Yet I nonetheless paid to go to London to see "Lens II: The Return of the Liverfluke". Even now, I am flabbergasted at my idiocy. The team was essentially the one that had in France invested vast new meanings to the word boredom. Getting my foot trapped in a lawnmower with the throttle jammed on full would have been considerably more entertaining, and rather less expensive: VHI does not, after all, reimburse rugby expenses. One may reasonably ask: why not? Was supporting Irish rugby in those days not a form of illness?
I have a friend who is not interested in rugby. She babbles and she drools. Visits are permitted every Wednesday afternoon, and gifts are welcome, provided they contain no sharp objects: that Swiss penknife, now, was a really bad idea, as the widow of her minister, the late Reverend Blenkinsop, can testify. Sometimes she forgets that she is in company and begins to . . . but no, we won't go into that here. Suffice to say, she is the only person in Ireland who is unaware of the transformation which has occurred in Irish rugby since Twickenham.
How did this happen? Never mind the team changes for a moment. How did the veterans of Lens and Twickenham suddenly begin to play the game the way that Brazilians would if rugby were their national game?
Players who unfailingly did with passes what a social climber will do with celebrity names suddenly developed velcro palms. Three-quarters who thought that evading tackles, or managing to retain the ball when tackled, was unsporting, began to dart around the pitch like a jack o' lantern, and if tackled invariably recycled the ball towards their own side.
Choreography
Scissors, dummy scissors, backward flips, and multiples of all of these, all performed with the elegance and ease of a choreographed ease of a Kirov Ballet masterpiece, suddenly infested Irish rugby.
It is not as if these characteristics were present in nascent form in Irish rugby. You'd have had a greater chance of finding Greenpeace activists tucking into a tasty side of grilled badger, cooked over a plutonium-fired barbecue, than you would have had detecting skill, even in embryo, in the Irish of Lens.
Yet last weekend, the French played just like the Irish did in Lens: stupid, unimaginative, lazy, smug. Meanwhile our lads played with gallic zest and zeal; and would still be playing with undiminished enthusiasm, matchless courage and effervescent brio even if the referee had swallowed his whistle and was unable to end the match. You remember the Irish contribution to the culture of rugby, the 70-minute game? That has now been replaced by a new ethic: play till the lights are out and the last chipvan's gone.
DNA inserted
It is as if Warren Gatland and his team had been overnight genetically modified: DNA containing stupidity, inertia, timidity, clumsiness was removed from the entire squad and secretly donated to the slumbering French, and meanwhile genetic extract of pluck, imagination, creativity and skill were inserted into the sleeping forms of the Irish.
People would have been burnt at the stake in the middle ages for conjuring such changes. Six months after the sludge of Lens, we have suddenly some of the best players in Europe. For decades we have endured scrumhalves whose passes suggested they were winding wool: we now have in Peter Stringer a scrumhalf whose service could disable a tank. Not merely have we one superb outhalf, we suddenly have two. And as for our centres, excuse me while I pause to roar with triumphant laughter.
Strange times indeed. At the beginning of the season, in a spirit of delinquent optimism, I said that Ireland was going to win the triple crown. The stupider of you might have imagined I was referring to the traditional triple crown of England-Scotland-Wales. That is a triple crown of the old union. I was of course referring to the new triple crown of the Republics: Italy-France-Scotland. What? Scotland not a Republic? Ah. You clearly haven't heard about recent events in Princess Street GPO.