Impeccable behaviour both on and off the pitch continues to be the mark of our sporting teams
PRESUMABLY IF it doesn’t work out with the rugby thing we can still win the supporters’ world cup. Our supporters are without a doubt world class, and this goes for every stadium sport: rugby, soccer, GAA.
You could leave the smallest infant or the feeblest old person on our terraces and the worst thing that could happen to them would be a bit of temporary hearing loss and a lifelong aversion to The Fields Of Athenry.
And our teams are grateful for the fans. They speak admiringly of them, as Irish rugby captain Brian O’Driscoll did yesterday; particularly when the fans have painted their faces green, put on stupid wigs and screamed themselves to a standstill. Our fans seem to enjoy screaming themselves to a standstill. In fact they stay on in stadiums long after the matches are over. They like hearing speeches – victory speeches that is – and never tire of waving to the camera, or emptying the local cash machines of their own money.
Because Irish fans are grateful, every time. Even when they’ve been forced to emigrate to another country in order to find jobs. Tom McGurk and Hookie have threatened to cry – as if this country hasn’t been through enough already – over the young Irish who make up such a large proportion of the supporters in New Zealand. But in fact the young Irish look as if they are having a fantastic time, and appear delighted to be associated with the country that has let them down so badly. Happily for us, a country is made up of more than its economists and its politicians.
None of our sports fans seem to want to fight anybody, which is not the case with the sports fans in more peaceful and prosperous countries like England, Germany and now even Australia and New Zealand, some of whose fans hate each other. In our sports the violence has stayed resolutely on the pitch – so far at least. And on-the-pitch violence is treated with ladylike delicacy by both the fans and the players, who step around it as if it was a bad smell which must somehow be both endured and ignored.
We saw this in Dunedin yesterday with Cian Healy, who was being badly treated, not to say goaded. His team-mates had to help him put up with the situation, to prevent him doing “something stupid”; in other words, retaliating and getting himself banned from the rest of the competition.
The fact that GAA fans, in particular, sit with the fans of the opposing team, and watch those teams tear lumps out of each other, before filing out of the stadium as decorously as nuns, is considered by visitors from other countries to be extraordinarily impressive, not to say a bit weird. I once worked with a man whose proudest boast – and he was boastful, as well as being a total devotee of GAA – was that he was the first television director covering GAA matches to pull the cameras back and show the fist fights happening off the ball. His superiors in broadcasting management did not congratulate him on this innovation; in fact he was treated as if he had rather ruined it for everybody with his crude interpretation of the truth.
You have to admit that it’s not every sport in which a gaggle of players steps back to reveal that the person having his nose packed with bandages is the referee, as happened in the hurling final at Croke Park this year. Okay, it was an accident. But it was still what we sports types like to call a blood injury.
The thing is, if our sports fans are better than everybody else’s, it is now beginning to look as if our players might be better than everybody else’s too. This is not to say they will beat the Welsh on Saturday. It is only the New Zealand commentators here who have the chutzpah to say so, in a population that is otherwise not prepared to tempt fate, or indeed annoy God in any way for quite some time. The native Irish are too superstitious to risk predictions; we can only brace ourselves for the tsunami of adrenalin that is going to hit at 6am on Saturday morning.
But our rugby stars are not photographed with their faces in the cleavages of strange ladies – not that I would particularly mind if they were – or being boorish to females. They have not so far been found attending a dwarf-throwing event – although, again, I wouldn’t mind if they were. It is interesting no explanation has ever been offered, or sought, for this excellent behaviour. It seems to be one of the few examples of public virtue which we have not analysed, or marketed through the tourist industry.
Perhaps it stems from the fact that our rugby players, like our GAA players and our soccer players, come from such small places. They are kept close to the people who follow them. There is no anonymity for them, anywhere. This is tough on our sports players, but the rewards, for those who can bear a lifetime of being a local hero, are great. No wonder the rest of us are grateful.