I Hate Paris in the Spring time

And they call it ‘the City of Love’ — a tag which has by now become something of a black joke. I’m not yet suggesting that we should nuke the place or raze it to the ground, but it must be said that Paris has not been the happiest of hunting grounds for our native sportsmen in recent months.

In its own way, the unmerciful shafting meted out to our Grand Slam heroes at the hands of Bastareaud and friends was as painful to behold as what went on last November in the same stadium, though I suspect it won’t be quite as difficult to come to terms with.
The match was a mouth-watering prospect, certainly the first time in living memory that we’d travelled to France half-expecting to win, with the added frisson that we’d be able to wreak a measure of revanche for the heinous outrage inflicted on our footballers by Thierry Henry. I must confess that I’d actually begun to regard the prospect of winning next year’s rugby World Cup as quite realistic, an opinion which perhaps will now have to be revised, in view of the bloodbath which ensued.
You go for more than a year without losing a match, you whip the world champions’ Afrikaaner asses, you watch a few dozen re-runs of Grand Slam Glory, you lap up Leinster and Munster’s consistent displays of borderline magnificence, and you start to entertain notions of immortality. In fact, no matter how much cautious realism you try to apply to your dispassionate diagnosis of the team’s state of health, you end up completely losing sight of the concept that it’s actually possible to lose games as well as win them. Thus, when the shafting is as raw, deep and bloody as this (33-10, and it’s in no way ludicrous to point out that the French could have racked up fifty) it’s natural to feel some vague sense of betrayal as well as all the other emotions which accompany calamitous defeat.
This may go some way to explain the hysteria which accompanied much of the post-match analysis. I must point out that while I obviously watched the match in its entirety (I despise these fuckers who make a point of vacating sporting contests before the final whistle has blown in order to ‘beat the traffic’ — would anyone seriously do the same with a film?), I have been completely unable to muster up whatever masochistic qualities are required to watch the re-run. I know full well that one learns more from defeats than victories, and that forensic examination is always especially important in a rugby context, where apparently minute details can and do make a colossal difference to the final score. But I like my life these days, and I can think of more enjoyable things to do with it on any given evening than sit down to watch an 80-minute video of Ireland being brutally sodomised. I’ll eventually get around to watching it, maybe, but it won’t be tonight, and probably not tomorrow either.
A few impressions remain, however. It wasn’t a ‘general systems failure’ in the strict sense: several of the basics were essentially OK. The scrum wasn’t too bad. Octogenarian prop John Hayes, inexplicably castigated for his performance in many quarters, actually did most things right. The lineout was excellent, Paul O’Connell rising into orbit to seize countless French throws. We got a few poxy breaks in the first half, and were literally an unfortunate bounce of the ball away from taking the lead. And in Paris, momentum is everything. Had we gone ahead, the day may have turned out very differently. Hanging in and grinding it out when things are going against them is never France’s strong suit (in any sport) but once they get on top with their metaphorical knees on your chest, they certainly know how to twist the knife deeper and deeper.
Newborn prop Cian Healy — and, less forgivably, the vastly experienced Jerry Flannery — displayed criminal stupidity on the disciplinary side of things, and you could see the momentum shift from the minute Healy was sin-binned. A team which had moved heaven and earth for 15 minutes without seeing any tangible reward on the scoreboard visibly got that chilling feeling that seizes you when it strikes you first that the fates might just have it in for you. And then they rack up a 10-point lead and the task starts to seem mountainous: you begin to be conscious of battling the clock as well as fifteen enormous mutant frogs, and you’re forced into taking options that you wouldn’t dream of pursuing if the scores were level. Then the errors creep in. Rudimentary handling errors, of which there were dozens on the day. Next thing you know, it’s become an out-and-out massacre, wave after wave of French attack piling insult upon insult. The final whistle was the sporting equivalent of shooting a wounded animal to put it out of its misery.
Life goes on. We are, of course, still in the middle of a Six Nations campaign. Unlike the soccer, which had a horrible finality to its conclusion, we don’t have the option of sitting there licking our wounds for months on end, which is probably a good thing.
Indeed, the next assignment is one for which no extra motivation should be needed: the foes are England, and it’s at Twickenham. And I expect us to win, perhaps quite emphatically.
A team which hadn’t lost a game since late 2008 hasn’t suddenly become a bad team overnight. However, I must weigh in on Johnny Sexton’s side in the Great Out-Half Debate. No harm intended to Ronan O’Gara — and anyone banging the ‘ROG MUST GO’ drum deserves nothing but scorn — but the simple fact is that Sexton’s greater physical presence is surely better suited to the challenges that lie ahead. He is at least as good a kicker as O’Gara, superior in the tackle, has no discernible weaknesses, and has repeatedly shown that he thrives on the big occasions. A date such as this is surely an absolutely ideal Six Nations baptism. He has to start. (I would also rate Eoin Reddan a more effective scrum-half than Tomás O’Leary, but you don’t want to shake things up too much in the middle of a campaign like this).
All that said, O’Gara was well within his rights in telling the ridiculously pompous Kevin Myers where to go. The man has written no shortage of stupid things in the course of his journey from Maoist eccentric to Ulster-unionist Thatcherite lickspittle, but in terms of pure mind-blowing idiocy, nothing that he’s ever penned — not even his ‘bastards’ rant about the children of single mothers — has come close to his recent attack on O’Gara. It wasn’t his first: he took umbrage last year at O’Gara’s perceived display of disrespect during an audience last year with British monarch Elizabeth Windsor, and upped the ante after the Paris catastrophe with a literate but spectacularly ill-informed broadside against the Grand Slam-winning out-half.
The article is worth re-reading several times in order to marvel at the levels of ignorance displayed throughout: Myers preposterously attempts to illustrate a connection between a rugby match and violence in Northern Ireland and the current economic recession. He doesn’t quite pull it off, but it’s amusing watching him try. In particular, the sentence ‘Ireland did not want to win’ surely deserves some sort of Pulitzer Prize as one of the most ridiculous observations in the history of journalism.
Twickenham, here we come. The good times are far from over (I hope). Send us home victorious, happy and glorious.