An Irishman's Diary

DECLAN BANNON (Letters, yesterday) beat me to it. But even so, I must record my own shame and disappointment at the behaviour of certain Irish rugby supporters after last week’s debacle in Paris.

Yes, it was only a minority. And clearly, there was exceptional provocation involved. Still, there can be no excuse for the mindless smuggery that I have witnessed on at least five separate occasions since, in the media and elsewhere.

I refer to the habit whereby rugby people congratulate themselves for their civilised behaviour on the night and suggest that had a soccer international been called off in similar circumstances, “there would have been a riot”.

Like our letter writer, I was particularly surprised to hear this from such a certified regular bloke as Matt Williams (Sport, Monday). To whom I’ll give a partial pass on the grounds that, in his native Australia, soccer is an even more foreign game than it ever was here.

The bit I have to take Matt up on, however, was when, after suggesting the likelihood of soccer fans rioting, he added: “The rugby people, well, we all went for a pint.” I congratulate the rugby people on this surprise strategy. Whichever of them thought of it first deserves praise. But I must also interject that Irish soccer fans have, for decades now, been reacting to adversity with precisely the same ploy.

In fact, dealing with disappointment by going for a pint is considered such an obvious gambit in soccer circles that only the absence of such a move – say, if fans console themselves in an art gallery instead – would normally merit comment.

As Declan Bannon suggests, soccer’s most obvious parallel with last week’s event was the infamous 2009 game in the same stadium and between the same countries. I was there, as it happens, for an occasion when the boundaries between the oval and round-ball codes became temporarily blurred.

As you’ll recall, the move leading to the French equaliser that night involved some of the slickest handling ever seen on a rugby pitch, although Thierry Henry also threw a blatant forward pass to put William Gallas in under the posts.

And how did soccer people react to the outrage? Well, we all went for a pint afterwards. I can’t even remember now who first suggested the idea – it was like everybody thought of it at the same time.

BUT– leaving Paris aside for a moment – the frozen pitch fiasco also reminds me of another soccer international I attended in the recent past: the Slovakia-Ireland Euro qualifier of 2010. Which, in some ways, had even more similarities with last week's rugby fixture.

It wasn’t just the pitch in Slovakia that was frozen. It was the entire population. Maybe Slovakians are naturally reserved, or maybe they still exhibit the stultifying effects of communism. Either way, the locals’ personalities appeared to be trapped in permafrost. So, as visiting Irish soccer fans, we considered it our responsibility to succeed where 20 years of democracy had failed, and melt the ice.

Naturally, the mission involved pint-drinking, although this was more difficult work than usual. In our hotel, the night before the game, a request for beer was treated with suspicion bordering on hostility.

Whether it was the insanely late hour we were up at – 10pm – or because the management had seen us chatting and laughing earlier, while clearly sober, and thought we were emotionally unstable, I don’t know.

In any case, it was only after tense negotiations that they granted us one bottle of beer each. And they appeared relieved when, having drunk it, we didn’t break any furniture.

On the afternoon of the match, there were some signs of a thaw. But that only made it worse when, a couple of hours before kick-off, the locals froze up again. Worst affected were the police, who surrounded the square where the beer-drinking visitors congregated: batons, riot shields, and Alsatians all ready for the violence they seemed to think inevitable.

Right up to game time, Irish fans persisted in the hope of penetrating the natives’ frozen surface. Only at the last minute was it conceded that, apart from a few isolated pockets of friendliness, the locals were unplayable. We were marched to the stadium under police escort and watched the game from behind a net designed to catch any petrol bombs we decided to throw. Then, a 1-1 draw later, we were escorted out again.

Had it been a rugby international and fans were treated like that, we thought afterwards, there would have been a riot (if only of letters to the newspapers). The soccer people, well, we just went for another pint.

But perhaps even self-congratulatory rugby fans deserve charity. Maybe, when they implied that the last-minute postponement of a French-Irish soccer international would have meant violence, it was the home fans they had in mind.

Fair enough. Then again, France is a country where political protest is the national sport. And given that rioting is always an option for groups as disparate as lorry-drivers, school-teachers, farmers, flower arrangers, and so on, it seems harsh to suggest that French soccer fans are any more volatile than the norm.