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Our illogical and traitorous support
By Ronan Early
 Atoo-often
heard comment on Saturday’s disappointing day in Twickenham is “if
it means O’Sullivan is gone then it’s worth it”.
Sometimes you’d get the impression that a lot of Irish people were
not only mildly pleased that we’d conspired to lose in such a lacklustre
manner that the axe is already swinging but they were actually wishing
it would all go nipples skyward even before the game kicked off.
I don’t know, maybe I’m being a young fogey but this strikes
me as not only disloyal but unpatriotic. And in a team with a radio jingle
for a national anthem the last thing we need is more treason.
Patriotism is an old-fashioned word. The modern equivalent seems to be
to wedge a city centre near you and sing drinking songs through an elastic
ginger beard but surely there is still something to be said for genuine
national pride. Not the kind of national pride that results in small-mindedness,
just the kind of national pride of wanting to see your country do well
preferably by the means of smashing England all over TW1.
How anyone could submit to the idea that a mauling by Phil Vickery and
Danny Cipriani and co would be a good thing is bizarre. Maybe in hindsight
we will look back on it as cathartic but in the here and now — all
we human beings can ever really inhabit or possess — surely it behooves
us to back any Irish team just like we would if they were on a winning
streak.
That’s a lot of the trouble today. So long as things are going just
swell everybody wants a piece of the action. The moment things dip the
reaction is either one of hostility or, worse, apathy.
Last week we spoke about event junkies and made a bit of a stand for them
in the context of the GAA National Leagues. To cut down 1,000 words into
a sentence, the Leagues are an inferior product to the Championship so
why should people be expected to sacrifice time and money following it?
(Jeez, that was a little too easy for my liking.)
In rugby it’s a different. The national team is the national team
and you’re either a supporter or you’re not. A lot of the
people who packed Croke Park in early 2007 and the hundreds of thousands
who wanted to join them when we crushed England will be taking a Diet
Coke break around now. Wake me up when we start winning again.
The ones that remain are hollering for the head of Eddie O’Sullivan.
To be fair, although I find the scapegoat culture a turn-off, I can’t
argue with people’s right to express an opinion. At the elite level
of sporting management you’re well compensated, you get over-the-top
praise when things go well and the down side is that when the wheels fall
off people tend to lose the run of themselves in a hunt for your blood.
But Eddie O’Sullivan, like all the rest of them, should have known
that before he even started. Those are the rules and if you can’t
stand the heat then get a job on the other side of the laptop. Although
be warned Eddie: The money’s not what you’re used to and the
praise won’t be lavish and the sharpened critical barbs aren’t
altogether absent either!
Eddie knows that however — if he didn’t before, then he sure
does by now. The magic has gone, we’re told and now it’s up
to someone to come back in and re-stoke the fire.
There’s fanciful talk of Jake White, South Africa’s World
Cup-winning boss, being lured by the IRFU now that the RFU have to hang
on to Ashton for a bit (yet another happy consequence of the defeat).
The only question I have is: Even if we do get White will things improve
massively? Ok, whoever comes will bring new ideas and invigorate a set-up
that has obviously gone stale. But that’s merely a spike. It takes
a lot more to get the graph pointing upwards year after year. Which, give
him his dues, O’Sullivan has done until late last year.
And here’s where I think the next man, whoever he may be, will struggle:
A lot of that success wasn’t down to Eddie or any coach. And a lot
of the hardship that’s in the post won’t be the doing of the
next guy. O’Sullivan was in the fortunate position to be able to
select three of the greatest players and leaders ever to wear the green
shirt: Brian O’Driscoll, Ronan O’Gara and Paul O’Connell.
These are the jewels of the so-called golden generation. All three won’t
have the same effectiveness over the next five years as they had over
the last. And there is no-one of their calibre coming through unlike in
England where they have a tidal wave of talented early-20-somethings breaking
through.
Where does that leave us?
It leaves us in an undesirable place that’s where. A place where
the best we can hope for is to make the optimum use of the limited resources
we have available. A place where we beat those home nations on a par with
us and just be competitive against the rest.
It’s a place where we couldn’t imagine hoping for a defeat
against England because we’re struggling to remember the last time
we beat them, when we’d had it so good that some of us even hoped
we’d lose against them in 2008 for the sake of change. Not that
the multitude of today’s so called supporters will be overly bothered.
By that stage they’ll be someplace else. |
