Blues in heaven

Now I can die happy. The weekend just passed will slowly fade into memory as the absolute pinnacle of the sporting experience, an illustration of exactly why we persist through the hard times. Perhaps this might be the ideal moment to retire altogether from consuming sport; the thought has certainly occurred, for the first time since that day in Giants Stadium in the summer of ‘94, that it may never get any better than this. In every respect it literally was a dream come true, and the warmth of the afterglow will permanently linger long after the immediate euphoria has subsided.

Certainly, Dublin could win another twenty All-Irelands and it would still be extremely doubtful that any of them could ever match Sunday’s blood-and-thunder epic in terms of drama, context or suspense. With the Ireland rugby gang, though, you somehow sense there’s even more to come. As I’ve stated repeatedly over the last few months, I doubt whether we’ll win the World Cup, but I’m completely convinced that we will come very, very close to it, that the nation is about to spend the next few weeks embarking on a roller-coaster adventure which will merit every comparison to Italia ‘90, that our kids and grandkids will in due time feast their eyes upon the 2011 episode of Reeling In The Years open-mouthed and wonder what it was like to actually live through it.

There was a time when I might have taken the weekend’s seismic events as my cue to get rabidly, uproariously, hideously plastered, but in fact I scarcely touched a drop all weekend, with the exception of three slow leisurely beers in my local on Friday night to ease me on my way to golden slumbers, the better to start bright-eyed and bushy-tailed at breakfast time on Saturday morning. Unprompted, an Aussie acquaintance took great pleasure in explaining exactly why Australia were going to wipe the floor with us, generously speculating that Ireland might manage to keep the scoreline respectable for half an hour (‘or less’) but that the Wallabies’ innate supremacy made the entire occasion effectively a formality. I declined his invitation to convene for ‘pints and footy’ at nine o’clock the following morning (there is something obscenely decadent about jousting with the demon alcohol at that hour, and I’ve already gone the distance in my misspent youth) and, for some mysterious reason, he hasn’t shown his face in public since. In general I quite like Aussies as a species, but sporting humility is perhaps not their strong point, an impression amply confirmed by a hugely enjoyable trawl through the Sydney Morning Herald a few hours after we’d put them to fire and sword. To point out that they were not happy bunnies would be a colossal understatement.

They will, of course, recover from this and reach the knockout stages, where I still think they might get their act together in time to outwit South Africa, who are undeniably brutal (in the best sense) but also, dare one say it, slightly ageing and creaky. Meanwhile, on the other half of the draw, the world has gone stone mad, as it slowly dawns on us that Ireland are perfectly positioned to avail of the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity of a place in the World Cup Final. Barring a preposterously unlikely series of upsets in the remainder of the Pool games, we are looking at a Northern Hemisphere mini-tournament for the prize of a tilt at one of the SANZAR behemoths on the big day. And right now, would you seriously back against Ireland?
People (not least journalists) frequently seem to forget just how fantastic this team is, and has been for years. It can now surely be stated without exaggeration that our back-row (Ferris, Heaslip, O’Brien) is the finest on the planet. Brian O’Driscoll is the single greatest player in the annals of 21st-century European rugby, and can certainly be counted on to give this an almighty few weeks’ effort. Every time it’s speculated that Paul O’Connell might be slowing down a little, he turns in a gobsmacking display like last Saturday’s. The front row, long seen as Ireland’s weak spot, has obliterated any doubts in spectacular fashion, monstering the Aussies into submission in an astonishing demonstration of potency which will give every other nation, New Zealand included, pause for reflection. The backs perhaps didn’t get the chance to strut their stuff all that often during the relentless, attritional trench-warfare pitched battle that the match became, but nor did they put a foot wrong, though a perfectionist might point out that Tommy Bowe possibly could have increased his chances of winning that breathless foot-race to the try-line in the dying minutes if he’d cut inside.

Johnny Sexton missed more goal chances than would have been ideal, but he is hardly alone in this regard, the tournament’s opening week having been notable for the extraordinary difficulties faced by even the most accomplished of placekickers. And of course, Mr. Ronan O’Gara is quite a weapon to spring from the bench, driven as he no doubt is by a burning urge to crown a stellar career with a glorious flourish on the biggest stage.
As individuals, these are very formidable players. As a collective, they are better than formidable when it all comes together, capable of inspiring one another to levels of performance which make the notion of winning the World Cup in no way ridiculous. It may be be no harm that the next assignment, against Russia, is a relatively low-profile encounter which will serve to bring everyone back down to earth. Of course, the team can also look distinctly underwhelming on its off-days (the opening game against the USA was not a pretty sight) but the evidence is that Ireland, a joke throughout the late 1980s and entire 1990s, are now perfectly realistic contenders to lift this World Cup. The next few weeks will not be dull.
As for the Dubs, there is really very little that pen, paper or word processor can do to convey the full extent of what they delivered us on Sunday afternoon. The script was straight out of Hollywood: had there been a GAA equivalent of Roy Of The Rovers when we were kids, they would have rejected it as a little too improbably neat and dramatic to be believed. Kerry four points clear with seven minutes to play; a thundering strike to the net right in front of the Hill; the momentum visibly taking a dramatic swing in the Dubs’ direction; tackles everywhere; a cacophony of voices dispensing contradictory advice (‘Hoof it long!’ ‘Keep the ball!’); a stupendously brilliant equaliser courtesy of the Kingdom’s utterly magnificent Kieran Donaghy, raising the spectre of a replay – and then, with roughly one million people watching through their fingernails, the entire thing boiling down to one (extremely tricky) free-kick.

By this stage, the heart had departed the mouth and climbed to somewhere behind the brain, thumping so loud I could hear the fucking thing. A million images flashed before the eyes, one of the most vivid being the thought of my 84-year-old neighbour who took me to Croker a couple of times as a nipper and has had a year of serious health difficulties, which I’m delighted to say he seems to have surmounted. I recalled every single near-miss of the last decade: the stunning implosion against Mayo in the ‘06 semi-final, the epic battles against Tyrone (‘05) and Kerry (‘07), the vicious demolition at the hands of Tyrone on the day Ronnie Drew died in ‘08, the massacre at Kerry’s hands the following year, the agonisingly slow meltdown against Cork in last year’s semi. Every single one of these setbacks seemed to make the prospect of Dublin ever winning the All-Ireland within my lifetime more and more elusive, and losing a Final would have been by far the deepest cut, a savagely cruel twist of fate to which I’d reluctantly begun to resign myself round about the 62nd minute, just before the clouds parted and the sun broke through.

As I write, the crowds are gathering throughout the city centre in scenes reminiscent of VE Day. Anyone who ever again tries to tell you that sport is a meaningless matter of zero consequence, a daft spectacle of twenty-odd grown men chasing an orb around a field for the entertainment of fools, a distraction from the weightier issues of day-to-day survival, deserves nothing but scorn, derision and (most of all) pity. You could just as easily dismiss art, cinema, music and literature as being ‘of no importance’ to people’s lives, and you’d be equally wrong. I know it’s only a game and perhaps not ultimately as important as the plight of disabled Third World lesbian whales, but it’s impossible to put a price on the joyful exhilaration evident on so many thousands of faces right now, or to measure the extent to which the weekend’s events have lifted spirits at a time when people’s spirits have never been more in need of a lift.
The ordinary punter is in debt up to his eyeballs. To the Dublin footballers and the Irish rugby team, our debt is incalculable. As Nelson Mandela once said to Francois Pienaar: “Thank you very much for what you have done for our country.”