Rugby: even better than the real thing (not)

Congratulations to the Ireland rugby team for winning its match against South Africa in Croke Park on Saturday. No, seriously, congratulations. I’m sure they played well and earned a well-deserved victory. Now can we stop pretending that anyone really cares about rugby except as a cheap fix to get them past the defeat of Ireland’s soccer World Cup squad?

Face it, it’s true: hardly anyone really cares about rugby. Unless you’re a Welsh coal miner or Boris Johnson’s cousin, rugby is simply strange game played by rich men with peculiar balls. In terms of team sports we care about, ‘rugger’ comes a distant third.

GAA football, meanwhile, is really only played by the Irish so internationals, such as they are, amount to neither fish nor foul games cobbled together so we can play the Australians and Scottish. Yawn. As significant and genuinely popular as football is, it’s not a world class sport – not because of any flaw in the game itself, simply because we’re almost the only people who play it (and the only people who are any good at).

So, when it comes to international team sports, soccer is where it’s at. Rugby football is a genuinely deeply supported sport in Ireland but that support is narrow, not widespread.

Its growth in recent years has been hailed as a victory for Ireland a grown-up, post-nationalist nation. Nothing could be further from the truth. Rugby has grown as a sport because the media needs to fill hours of airtime and dozens of pages with some kind of team sport activity and all they could write about soccer, the ball game people really watch, was ‘Ireland – we’re not very good’ or, more recently, ‘We wuz robbed’.

As with the bizarre spectacle of people pretending to care about Ireland’s cricket squad, the endless prattle about Irish rugby is nothing more than a sad attempt to hold on to some national sporting pride in the face of Ireland’s soccer slump.

The political dimensions that rugby does take on are those that have been forced on it: it is the un-GAA, suitable for all – no bog-trotting here and none of those damn oiks either. Ra ra ra!

The idea of rugby as a national sport is, of course, nonsense. Apart from the inexplicable phenomenon of Munster rugby, the game has always been a minority sport enjoyed by overpaid and underemployed chinless wonders who attended posho schools, roysh.

The snobbery exists off the pitch as much as it does on it. Much is made about how rubgy, unlike soccer, attracts a jubilant crowd rather than a riotous one. Not that there is much rioting at Ireland soccer internationals, mind, but they do get frightfully rowdy ‘over the water’, don’t you know?

Anyone who has ever had the ‘pleasure’ of dealing with pissed-up rugger buggers might feel differently but we’ll ignore that for now – after all, everyone else does. How about that for a slogan? Rugby: a better class of yob.

Besides, it all depends on your definition of ‘better’. Some of us have long enough memories to not think too highly of white South Africans and the less said about that awful spectacle of the stupid New Zealand squad composed of ex-public schoolboys pretending to be Maoris… Please!

It may well be true that rugby’s well-heeled fans are better behaved than soccer fans. Fine. The egg chasers and their fans can be as polite as they like. I have only one thing to say to them: balls.