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’.