To Borussia with Love

Good Christ, the cold turkey has struck with a vengeance. At the time of writing it isn’t even June yet, and I’ve just spent the guts of a week lamenting the absence of any meaningful sporting combat and searching desperately for alternative forms of escapism that might fill the void.

Foul Play’s footballing season ended in characteristically tragic fashion, with a 33/1 wager on the mighty men of Dortmund finally going up in smoke one minute from the end of the Champions’ League Final, leaving me with precisely no profit and a scrunched-up E20 docket to show for what had undoubtedly been a truly inspired selection. It may be a dull way of conducting business, but I’ve finally concluded that each-way is most certainly the wisest course of action for these long-shot bets, at least allowing you the security of a decent reward for narrow failure.
All business considerations aside, sentiment had also begun to intrude: I’d formed a profound emotional attachment to Jurgen Klopp’s troops and grown to really enjoy watching them in the course of an epic voyage that included their total dismantling of Manchester City, a ridiculous two-goals-in-stoppage-time late escape against Malaga, and a barnstorming, breathtaking 4-1 demolition of Real Madrid. The laws of economic gravity in the relentlessly rich-get-richer world of top-level European football will almost certainly ensure that it won’t happen again, and that this wonderful side is about to be broken up and scattered to the four winds.
It seemed cruel in the extreme that they ended the season empty-handed, and aside from the almost-certain imminent pillage of their best players (Lewandowski, Reus, Gundogan: Gotze has already gone) by richer clubs with superior paying power, there will surely now be a frenzied scramble for the managerial services of the highly eccentric ‘Kloppo’, a compelling character who in his way embodies the new smiling, friendly face of German football, stereotyped for so long as the preserve of charmless, ‘ruthlessly efficient’ pragmatists. It hasn’t yet reached the point where I’d honestly regard the Bundesliga as a better or more entertaining spectacle than the Spanish top flight, and Bayern’s stranglehold over the rest is already very pronounced and is only likely to intensify in the future, with Pep Guardiola arriving this summer to assume the reins. Still, Dortmund’s was a fantastic adventure while it lasted.
I wasn’t daft enough to stick anything more than a token tenner the following day on Hibs, my first and deepest sporting love, as they took on the might of Celtic in the Scottish Cup Final, a trophy which has eluded us since 1902. Sure enough, it was another deeply unpleasant afternoon, Hibs managing to stay on level terms for all of eight minutes, eventually succumbing in rather tame, deferential fashion to a 3-0 defeat. It didn’t quite compare to the 2012 Final (we lost 5-1 to Hearts) in sheer horrendousness: I’d entered the match with no expectation whatsoever of a positive outcome, but there was still a twinge of heartbreak inherent in the whole experience. I don’t think I could handle this happening every year.
Happily, the weekend’s pain was dulled by a lovely treble-figure profit on the magnificent warriors of Leinster, who put the sons of Ulster to the sword in the Final of the RaboDirect Pro12, not a competition I’d ordinarily be inclined to jump up and down about. Not that there was a great deal of time for them to lie back afterwards and savour the triumph, as the cream of Irish rugby — Messrs. Healy, O’Connell, O’Driscoll, Best et al — and their English, Welsh and Scots counterparts now must drag their bruised and battered bodies Down Under for a gruelling month of sustained savagery against the Australians. Yep, it’s Lions time again.
Among sporting enthusiasts, opinion is somewhat divided as to the intrinsic worth of the Lions series. I can remember a time when they were referred to as ‘The British Lions’, a tag unlikely to invite Irish fans to feel emotionally engaged with the team’s fate. The term, with its (let’s not be too prickly here) geographically misleading and politically patronising overtones, was reformed at the turn of the millenium, but I never bothered engaging with the 2001 Tour: I was a father of newborn twins, spare time was obviously a rare commodity, and almost the entire team was English.
The first time I actually got excited to the point of reading up on the series and setting the alarm in time to watch it was four years later, in 2005, when Brian O’Driscoll captained the party to New Zealand. He was brutally evicted from the series two minutes into the first Test by a sickening ‘spear-tackle’ from Tana Umaga and Keven Mealamu, the rampant Kiwis went on to sweep the series 3-0 – all thumping victories – and the tour itself is generally remembered as an utter disaster. Nonetheless, I’d finally ‘got’ what the Lions concept was about, and high on the annus mirabilis of 2009 (Ireland’s epic Grand Slam, Leinster’s Heineken Cup de-flowering) I was well and truly ‘up for it’ by the time ‘we’ landed in South Africa four years ago.
That series also went down as a defeat against the then-World Champions, but one far more honourable than that of four years previously, with the Lions outscoring their opponents over the course of the three Tests, narrowly losing the first two and cleaning up in the third. The enduring image of the Tour is of Schalk Burger, a deeply hard-to-like Afrikaaner gentleman, ramming his fingers into Luke Fitzgerald’s eyeballs within the first minute of the second Test. No action was taken by either the ref or the IRB, and the post-match comments of Springbok boss Pieter de Villiers spoke for themselves: “It’s sport, man. That is what it’s all about. Why don’t we all go to the nearest ballet shop and get some nice tutus? No eye-gouging, no tackling, no nothing. Then see how much you enjoy it.”
What has become painfully apparent from the Christchurch and Pretoria episodes is that there is, to put it mildly, a difference in the unofficial codes of conduct between Northern and Southern hemisphere rugby, as borne out by a look at online fan reaction to the 2009 incident. A statement to the effect that perhaps eye-gouging and biting stretched the boundaries of fair play a little too far was met with the response “Down here we play to win. Go away and play with your dolls, you fag.” O’Driscoll, having publicly taken exception to the vicious manner in which his 2005 Tour was ended, was dismissed by his assailant Umaga as a “sook” (New Zealand slang for a cry-baby). The prevailing attitude seems to be that anything which stops short of attempted strangulation is pretty much fair game.
Taking all this into account, and in view of the inherently huge difficulty involved in assembling players from four different national teams and welding them into a coherent, unified force capable of taking on and beating an established Test superpower (this time, Australia) in their own back-yard, I admit I’m stunned to see the Lions quoted as marginal favourites to win the series. But I’ll watch every minute. Once more, with feeling...