MOST OF the Fiachra-Come-Latelies – who for a few brief years somehow navigated the Liffey bridges for purposes other than going to the airport – will now doubtless be turning their thoughts to sunny summer sojourns. Those with bit-parts in the Namadrama may look to less expensive hols at the second pad in some Foxrock Cois Fharraige, the Rangie loaded with plonk from Aldi or Lidl.

A handful of Leinster’s nouveau poseurs may keep an eye on the business end of the rugby season, if only because the eponymous sponsor brews their lager of choice. But Pat Gilroy and Anthony Daly can stop fantasising that Croker might have become a habit. Those who don’t even “get” Ross O’Carroll-Kelly would probably guess Parnell Park’s an adultery motel.

But the Heineken and, to a lesser extent, the Magners are to the Irish rugby heartland the competitions that make pulses race and domestic schedules suffer.

Leinster and Munster are still in with serious shouts of winning both or either – injuries, reffing interpretations and a French resurgence permitting. And looking back at the way recent seasons have unfolded, the game is in very good health on this island. Wit, imagination, planning and sensible strategies have been applied to get us here.

You’d wish you could say something similar about the International Rugby Board (IRB), whose messing and almost wilful incompetence suggests that muddied oafs in blazers must still be involved in making decisions – of which the refereeing debacle is but the latest example.

And yet. It’s sometimes said the laws of probability dictate that if you put a troupe of monkeys into an enclosed space, fed and watered and provided with typewriters, they’d eventually come up with work of Shakespearean brilliance.

So credit to the IRB. It spent years – nay, decades – neglecting and dissing Argentina. For just one instance, Brian O’Driscoll’s talented outhalf father, Frank, played twice for Ireland internationally, but got capped for neither game because the Argentines were regarded as among the untermensch of rugby’s nations.

But finally, after Argentine players in general and that terrific national advocate Agustin Pichot, in particular, made it too damned hard to ignore their eminence any more, the IRB is on the brink of putting them into an expanded Southern Hemisphere competition with the Sanzars.

Pichot, as gutsy and effective a player as I’ve ever seen, also had to fight his own national blazers, the blinkered committee men who blanked his team after their famous London win by 25-18 in 2006 (the game got Andy Robinson sacked). Now watch him drive Puma momentum from their new competitive base.

The Russian revolution will also bear watching. They’ve qualified for their first World Cup, alongside neighbours Georgia, and Sevens is now an Olympic sport. Rugby survived somehow in the Soviet Union despite a Stalinist ban and the collapse of the USSR, after which funding for non-Olympic sports dried up.

The game’s now got an ardent and oligarchic backer in one Vyacheslav Kopiev, vice-president of the Sistema conglomerate. Rugby has also got the support of sports minister Vitaly Mutko, and the mayor of Moscow, Yuri Luzhkov, is pushing the IRB to stage the 2013 World Cup Sevens in his city. Beware of this Bear.

Cricket thrives in a particularly sticky wicket

THE NOTION that rugby’s fons et origo was veritably the moment when one William Webb-Ellis picked up a ball and ran with it during a game of coarse kickabout at Rugby school has always smacked of fiction become fact through propagandist repetition.

It has travelled far and well, but it does lack camera-phone evidence.

The messy business of human affairs means games travel and prosper in far-from-predictable or reliable ways.

A case in point was provided by Afghanistan qualifying for the recent cricket Twenty20 World Cup in the Caribbean.

I like to think I may have had a basement view some 30 years ago when working in northern Pakistan, reporting on the vast, miserable camps into which had been decanted several million Afghans fleeing the fierce conflict between their countrymen and the Soviets (at that time, the most recent set of military fantasists to imagine that fractious and fissiparous country could be subdued).

The tented sprawl was on plains deluged that spring with rain that turned the site into a swamp of sticky, ochre mud.

When the rain cleared, the sun was brassy-strong, and would doubtless in summer be suffocating for those trying to scramble some sort of extended-family life together under old army-issue canvas.

Yet on patches of semi-dry mud, children did what they always do: they played with whatever was to hand.

Some had learned the rudiments of the local passion-game from watching neighbouring Pakistanis: it was with rag-balls and sticks for bats, but it was recognisably cricket.

Back in Afghanistan, according to lore and photographic evidence, the national and traditional game was bushkazi, which can only be summarised as savage keep-ball on horseback, using the beheaded carcass of a goat. Limited international potential, one surmises.

Now in Kabul, Jalalabad and Kandahar, despite (or, perhaps, in a dog-stubborn way, because of) Taliban opposition, posters of the T20 players are feted, the team had an audience with President Karzai and dinner with the US ambassador, who pledged funding for two proper cricket grounds (they’ll be the country’s first).

The sporting gods truly move in mysterious ways. But wonders they do perform.

World of sport loses two good sports

TWO DEATHS this year on the island next door diminished us all, not least in the world of sport. One man was a politician, the other a scientist, working in pharmacology and doping in sport. Solid men, both.

Arnold Beckett was a pioneer in the field of drug testing in sport as early as the 1960s and supervised, for instance, the first such programme at the soccer World Cup in England back in 1966.

He also became part of the International Olympics Committee’s (IOC) medical commission when testing began at the Mexico City games in 1968 (the first “steroid” games).

In 1988, he headed the team that caused Ben “Stanozolol” Johnson to be stripped of his 100 metres Seoul gold medal.

Beckett, of strong mind and opinion, clashed with another IOC medico, Manfred Donike, on what he saw as issues of practice and principle, and ended up working in defence of sportspeople he felt had been unfairly handled. In particular, he sided with Alain Baxter, a Scottish skier who lost his 2002 bronze over a non-stimulant, methamphetamine isomer ingested from a nasal spray.

One’s faith in the essential good nature of sports competitors was reinforced at the time when Austrian skier Benjamin Raich, who’d been given Baxter’s medal, returned the bronze to the Scot on the grounds that it was rightfully his.

Then there was Michael Foot, former British Labour party politician and controversialist, whose father, Isaac, took him and his brother, Dingle, to local soccer matches in the early 1920s, and of whom it was reported that the only things that mattered to him were politics, people, books, dogs, whisky (stet) and Plymouth Argyle (a club that so valued him in return that, on his 90th birthday, they registered him as a player and gave him the squad number 90).

Asked if he still held fast to his listed half-dozen favourite things, Foot replied: “I’ve given up drinking whisky.”

F I N A L S T R A W

Great sporting headlines that made us smile.

It was suggested elsewhere and recently that a hoary one about polar adventurer Vivian Fuchs was a runner. It read: “Dr Fuchs Off Again.”

In a week when yet another Glasgow Celtic manager hit the canvas, I’m a fan of the headline re the match that cost John Barnes his job, after Inverness Caledonian Thistle beat the Celts: “Super Caley Go Ballistic, Celtic Are Atrocious”.

And finally . . . one of the truly great soccer exchanges, just before gobby Rodney Marsh (left) of Man City took the field before his ninth and (surprise!) final game for England.

Alf (infamously humourless) Ramsey: “If you don’t work harder, Marsh, I’ll pull you off at half-time.” Marsh: “Jesus, Boss, at City we only get an orange and a cuppa.”

Hurling helmet has history with ice hockey

THE NATIONAL Hurling League gets curiouser by the weekend. Another league and championship double must now be beyond Brian Cody’s Kilkenny, after three defeats about which they cannot seriously complain.

Cork are simmering nicely, even if the twin-towers pairing of Michael Cussen and Aisake Ó hAilpÍn is beginning to seem a side-show that’s unlikely to distract the county’s understated manager, Denis Walsh.

Little’s been said about the H-word. There’s the odd comment when a goalie is beaten and might, perhaps, have been unsighted by wire or helmet surround, but that’s about it.

Compulsory helmet wear has been a long time coming, but every hurling mother wanted it fervently.

I remember seeing University College, Cork, hurler Michael Murphy wearing a motorbike helmet down the Mardyke in 1966 because, if memory serves me accurately, he was protecting an injured head.

UCC and Murphy pushed the issue and the college, prompted by Murphy, got in ice-hockey helmets and modified them as best they could for hurling needs.

They used them in the 1969 Fitzgibbon Cup, and UCC’s Donal Clifford was the first intercounty player to use the gear later that year.

It always struck me as incongruous that our sublime and silken sliotar game had recourse for the helmets to ice hockey, of which pursuit it was once remarked: “I went to an all-out fight last night, and an ice-hockey game broke out.”