FROM THE ARCHIVES:A torrential downpour when Ireland played Scotland at Lansdowne Road in 1927 turned the match into a mudfest, as Bertie Smyllie described in this report. – JOE JOYCE
CONDITIONS FOR the players and for those unhappy wretches on the uncovered stand were appalling. The former had at least something to do, and were sure of a hot bath immediately after the game; but the latter had no such consolation.
For ninety perishing minutes there they sat in a pitiless downpour of rain. And what rain it was! It found its way into every square inch of you body – down your neck in a steady stream, up your sleeves in miserable trickle, through your most intimate garments with pneumonic ooze, and finally into your boots with a heavy squelch.
The Irish arrived on the field in jerseys of brilliant green and snowy shorts, while the Scots were similarly attired in cheerful blue. Within a few minutes, however, all thirty had acquired a rich coating of nice, brown mud, and the only persons who really might be described as paying homage to the national colour were those four thousand “ten-shillings-a-timers” on the uncovered stand.
Some had brought umbrellas, some had rugs, most had raincoats of one kind or another. There were hundreds of women, who arrived with full complements of Marcel waves, and a variety of pharmaceutical adornment; but rain is a great leveller, and before the game was over all had been reduced to a common degree of bedraggled misery. Dublin’s beauty was like a bevy of drowned rats.
As for the Press, the less said the better. Some eighty members of that maligned estate were in the middle of the new stand, and were “doing” the match. One of them has the pulp of his notebook, a poor sodden thing, as his sole memento of the occasion. Here and there on the swollen pages may be traced the remains of a name that was writ in water but that is all. The rest is slush. It might not have been so bad if one gentleman, in an ecstasy of delight when Ireland scored, had not decanted the contents of a deep-brimmed billycock hat into the lap on which that notebook was reposing; or if the notebook itself had not fallen with a sickening flop into the nine inches of accumulated water in which the occupants of the front row were paddling their feet.
At this point it might be well to mention that Ireland won the match by two tries to nil. In the intervals of bailing out laps and pockets, we saw quite a lot of the game. I heard two old gentlemen – those of that giant race before the flood – who declared that a certain match in eighty -something was played in worse conditions, but I do not believe it. Nothing could have been worse.
For the first few minutes all went well. Then somebody took a flying header into the mud, and the fun began. In ten minutes the forwards were unrecognisable; a quarter of an hour afterwards the backs were in like case, and before half-time the only difference between Irishman and Scot was the accent.