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    Six Nations Army

    Rogin the Armchair Fan wrote:
    I'm heartily sick of the "Rugby fans are all jolly nice blokes, not like that football rabble" cobblers, that gets trotted out ad nauseum by people who've never been near a pub in Wigan when St Helens are in town ...
    Heh. Thursday's Daily Telegraph had a surprisingly defensive sports letters page. Three retired colonels complaining that try-scorers were celebrating wildly like soccer-playing pooves.

    There was a 20 man brawl at the Millennium today after less than a minute's play (the Welsh #8 bodychecked Ireland's out-half to kick it off).

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      Six Nations Army

      I don't recognise all the Irish names. Which ones are the Kiwis?

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        Six Nations Army

        I think we can confidently say that Gavin Henson is not a top class full back. A fit Lee Byrne, and Wales win that match.

        Have to say, pace The Moral Animal's experience that Cardiff City Centre was pretty good-spirited later on.

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          Six Nations Army

          Great win for Ireland and a deserved Grand Slam. O Driscoll & O Connell were the outstanding players throughout the campaign.

          A downside to the victory is the typical response by the Irish public - that of celebrating success in one sport by demeaning others. Already the airwaves are full of bullshit, with soccer in particular being put down. After the probable 0-0 or 1-1 with Bulgaria next weekend it will be open season on 'the soccer crowd' and their failure to inspire and lift the nation. In the height of the GAA season we hear how soccer and rugby don't ignite the sort of passion that Gaelic Games do. And of course, any time the Irish soccer team qualifies for a major international tournament, every other sport is rubbish in comparison.

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            Six Nations Army

            this is only the beginning of it. Morkeshing goys are I mean like totally creaming themselves here. In fact it's like totally the light at the end of for these goys. The Soccer goys would have to like totally win like the World cup to be as golden as our Goys are right now. The Dricster and Rog are going to be I mean totally minted right now. [/toro]

            in most proper international sports, playing five other teams in your region home and away over two years is called a qualifying group. In rugby it's called two six nations championships.

            It is very impressive, given that the bar for success in rugby is set so very low, that this is Ireland's first victory since the days when we were the only people without rationing of basic foodstuffs, and the other countries had suffered huge casualties in the second world war.

            and all it took was home games against a France managed by Raymond domenech's half simple brother, and an england team managed by Tony Adams without the piano playing, and a victory over the fearsome power of Wales..... woooooooo.

            It's such a shame that only about 6 countries in the world take rugby seriously because as it stands, how can we possibly compare Ireland's rugby greats against our football players, who would only have to defeat every country in europe in their favourite sport to win a similar trophy.

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              Six Nations Army

              And of course, any time the Irish soccer team qualifies for a major international tournament, every other sport is rubbish in comparison.

              That's a new one on me, I must say.

              a victory over the fearsome power of Wales..... woooooooo.

              Wales are a pretty good team, in fairness. However, I'm not sure that the rest of Ireland's opposition this year could exactly be described as formidable.

              Interesting to see that they've won the championship with by far the lowest points-difference (+48) of any table-topper since the Five Nations became the Six Nations in 2000.

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                Six Nations Army

                So what conclusion can you possibly draw from a supposition like that? That this year's winners have battled their way through a genuinely competitive championship, against 3 opponents who have all, in the last 6 years, won a Grand Slam of their own? Or that failing to beat every other team by a country mile like some predecessors did (when England won the Grand Slam in 2003, let's face it, no-one else in the tournament was worth a bean) means they're less worthy than their predecessors?

                I don't know which you mean.

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                  Six Nations Army

                  Goys? I'm seriously missing something here, I think.

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                    Six Nations Army

                    Affinity to rugby in Dublin is closely associated with an inability to properly use the u sound. For instance When toro sees this he will tell me to Fock off. He's not the worst at it by any means, but when he gets angry he can be a match for any of the Morkeshing people I met last year.

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                      Six Nations Army

                      Oh, see, I read "goys" like a Finchley boy.

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                        Six Nations Army

                        You get all sorts of crazy vowel sounds in Ireland. For instance, I tend to pronounce my name with two U's even there isn't one in my name, (this is the Irish pronounciation, much like Filum)

                        Then there is a rather telegraphed joke in the commitments where Jimmy Rabbitte asks the three commitmentettes not to sing in their own accents, as the chorus of Mustang sally isn't actually "Roid Sally Roid", meanwhile someone with a strong Donegal accent will say High Nigh Brine Kye.

                        Ireland has so many different and quite frankly bizarre accents that I'm not sure that we needed that australian pronunciation thing on top of everything.

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                          Six Nations Army

                          vennegoor strokes wrote:
                          [quote]And of course, any time the Irish soccer team qualifies for a major international tournament, every other sport is rubbish in comparison.

                          That's a new one on me, I must say.
                          quote]

                          You don't recall the public mood in 2002 when football was king, the only game in town, the younger, lesser, Keane, Duff & Given were the nation's new heroes, and Irish rugby was considered a joke and GAA was still in the dark ages?

                          Cos that's what was spouted in the media.

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                            Six Nations Army

                            i was happy that ireland finally won the grand slam, particularly for o'driscoll whose tries against england and wales impressed me. it's the best performance by an irish team athlete since roy keane in the 2002 qualifiers.

                            five minutes later RTE had george hook and brent pope talking about the wider social significance of the win. hook stated that rugby was competing with other sports in ireland for scarce funding at a time of economic collapse and that the grand slam meant the sport had just pushed its way to the front of the queue. pope conjured a dystopic vision in which every man, woman and child in ireland would play rugby as their primary means of personal expression.

                            i suppose it is not rugby's fault that RTE's rugby coverage sucks balls. i am still pleased for the team. yet the fervour with which many of my friends greeted the result is alien to me in a rugby context and reminds me that a disturbingly large proportion of them went to private school. i remember one of them, also a football fan, saying he felt more excited by the achievements of the rugby team because, unlike the soccer players, they were guys like him. he meant that the soccer guys are all millionaires living in england whereas the rugby players mostly live here and are not seriously rich, but that's not what i initially took him to mean.

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                              Six Nations Army

                              Listen, that's a really unusually rich, diverse and distinctive sporting scene you guys have, especially given the population of Ireland. Is that not a cause for celebration? Or is that just naive of me?

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                                Six Nations Army

                                If anyone's interested, a crowd estimated at 17,500 (RTE News) turned up in Dublin city centre earlier today to welcome the national heroes home. Looks like rugby union is not the heartbeat of the race after all.

                                Impact Substitute wrote:
                                You don't recall the public mood in 2002 when football was king, the only game in town, the younger, lesser, Keane, Duff & Given were the nation's new heroes, and Irish rugby was considered a joke and GAA was still in the dark ages?

                                Cos that's what was spouted in the media.
                                I genuinely cannot remember any big concerted anti-GAA campaign in the media (in which I work) in 2002. Gaelic games were going great guns at the time, and still are.

                                We had just had a great football championship which ended with Kerry being dethroned by Meath, who in turn got whipped by a really good Galway team spearheaded by Padraic Joyce. In the hurling, Kilkenny were seemingly untouchable but got bayoneted by Galway, who in turn threw away the final. It was not remotely a dull time for Gaelic games, which in any case had been on a steep upward curve since the mid-1990s.

                                Ireland's rugby team were pretty undistinguished in early/mid-2002, apart from a heavy win over an abysmal Wales, so they would have been a fairly deserving target. But seriously, I cannot remember this "soccer's great, let's sneer at other sports" stuff back then at all. Maybe some of the O'Reilly titles came out with it and I didn't hear about it, but they're not exactly essential reading.

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                                  Six Nations Army

                                  So what conclusion can you possibly draw from a supposition like that? That this year's winners have battled their way through a genuinely competitive championship, against 3 opponents who have all, in the last 6 years, won a Grand Slam of their own? Or that failing to beat every other team by a country mile like some predecessors did (when England won the Grand Slam in 2003, let's face it, no-one else in the tournament was worth a bean) means they're less worthy than their predecessors?

                                  I admire your attempts to cheerlead for Ireland, Rogin, but this has been a deeply unexceptional Six Nations -- look at the number of bad or average matches in it, something like 12 out of 15 -- and Ireland have just about managed to be that little bit less unexceptional than everyone else. If they were seriously good, they would have torn this deeply porridgey England side to pieces rather than winning by a miserly point, and would not have been outplayed by Lievremont's pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey selection for the majority of the match before hanging grimly on for a win -- both at home.

                                  Ireland went head to head with England for a Grand Slam in 2003 and got walloped 42-6. That England team had come very close to three other Grand Slams in the previous four years, and later in 2003 won the World Cup. Turning them over would have been a serious achievement. Ireland couldn't do it (to put it mildly), but what the hell.

                                  There was no side like that in this year's Six Nations, to put it equally mildly.

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                                    Six Nations Army

                                    but that rich diverse sporting heritage is increasingly coming under threat because of changing sociological factors.

                                    Historically Rugby was played in schools run by orders that were interested in educating what would have been described as the castle catholic class. The Jesuits, The holy Ghost fathers etc. These schools catered for the merchant class, lawyers, large farmers etc. These people would have been broadly pro-home-rule within the Union. (leading to the tag west brit)

                                    The Christian brothers schools which were to cater to the lower middle class and the poor were the backbone of Gaelic Games. Every strong county has one or two schools that provide several players every year.

                                    Over the last 10 years or so, with the expansion of dublin down as far as offaly, and with people's desire for upward social mobility combined with the odd notion that rugby means a better class of school a lot of schools are moving from gaelic games to rugby, and it will have an unfortunate effect on the counties around dublin, and on cork.

                                    Rugby has little or no effect on Soccer playing schools insofar as there are any. The ones in dublin are generally in areas not amenable to rugby, and also rugby is a radically different sport to football.

                                    The sport that rugby poses a problem for is gaelic football. It's a very physical sport, and ulster teams seemed to have turned it into a form of high speed fighting. If you're into the physical contact aspect of it, and a lot of gaelic footballers are, then rugby offers a game based almost entirely on physical aggression.

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                                      Six Nations Army

                                      VS - There was plenty of sneering at the GAA in 2002. When Ireland were playing Spain, Derry were playing Donegal in an Ulster Semi Final. It was a woeful game, not helped by the weather, and was notable by the number of supporters who chose to miss the first half in order to watch the extra-time and penalties from Suwon. Kerry & Cork also met that afternoon in another turgid game. Soccer was being held up as the brightest light and the only game kids were going to be interested in. Yet, one week later, Dublin & Meath served up a great game in the first game in the redeveloped Croke Park.

                                      Two years ago, soccer was being belittled because our international side was making a show of themselves in San Marino the same week a the rugby team were hammering England in Croke Park.

                                      It's the way it goes over here. Rather than compare the relative merits of the teams involved, or just merely celebrate success in that code, people pick on the sport that has less feel-good factor among the populace at the time.

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                                        Six Nations Army

                                        I remember the Donegal-Derry game. Donegal won. There were about 2,000 people at it. That was always going to happen because of the GAA's inability to reschedule the match at short notice.

                                        And yeah, there were a couple of sneery comments by stupid people about the low crowd figure, which hardly constituted a campaign. All of which was forgotten the following weekend when Dublin and Meath did battle. Dublin then went on a six-game run to the semi-finals and played to packed houses every week (for some weird reason, the weather for all their matches was excellent even though the summer was a complete washout otherwise), and Gaelic games dominated the sporting agenda once again for the next four months.

                                        Soccer gets sneered at a lot in this country by rugby and GAA types, but apart from isolated foghorns like George Byrne and Ian O'Doherty there is no real anti-GAA bandwagon any more, and hasn't been since the early 1990s.

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                                          Six Nations Army



                                          Stamping on Kubelgog and vennegor's faces. FOREVER.

                                          Edit: Look at Kidney's beergut!

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                                            Six Nations Army

                                            An England fan reduced to posting up pictures of Ireland winning a trophy.

                                            Jesus, Eggchaser, do you have a single atom of self-respect in your entire body?

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                                              Six Nations Army

                                              An Irish person reduced to etc.

                                              I mean, look, I'm licking the salty tears from AIATL's big bald face, that's just funny.

                                              But Vennegoor, you're confronted with four winners in seven years and - contrary to what everybody thinks about hegemony in the English or Scottiush Premier Leagues - you take it to be evidence of a weak tournament. An Ireland team who finished second five years out of the last nine win, and you say it's an aberration. They score more tries than the opposition in every single game, and you call them dull; they possess the tournament's two outstanding players, and you call them uninspired.

                                              There comes a point where you stop looking blinkered, and start looking delusional.

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                                                Six Nations Army

                                                Ahem, so, when Jones was lining up his kick, I was slumped off my seat, on the ground, with my head in my hands, saying "how have we fucked this up again? how can we possibly have fucked this up? how is it that we have again fucked this up?"

                                                By the time the camera cut to Jackie Kyle in the stands afterwards, I was properly in tears.

                                                I started following the side properly in 1988. It was then forty years since we won a Grand Slam. Even then it seemed absurd, an obvious aberration of some sort. Little did I imagine it would be half that again. My Dad wasn't even born when we won the first time.

                                                A great, great day. It's finally done.

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                                                  Six Nations Army

                                                  Is the trifecta here between Toro, VS and AIATL just giving them a chance to warm up for Liverpool's EPL title triumph?

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                                                    Six Nations Army

                                                    But Vennegoor, you're confronted with four winners in seven years and - contrary to what everybody thinks about hegemony in the English or Scottiush Premier Leagues - you take it to be evidence of a weak tournament.

                                                    Hang on a second, I'm not talking about the number of winners, or stuff that happened seven years ago. I'm talking about the Six Nations in its current state (i.e. this year and last). It is not a tournament in good shape. France aren't giving it a real go, England have been struggling along in their worst run of form for a generation, Scotland haven't got the players to be competitive, Italy are really bad, and Wales are a pretty good side. That's the sum total of what Ireland had to beat this year to be top of the pile.

                                                    If the 6N were in good shape, it would have thrown up more than three decent games. And if Ireland truly were a great side, they would have gone out and wiped the floor with the frankly ordinary opposition (Wales excepted) instead of scraping home by narrow margins in match after match.

                                                    Meanwhile, Tom Humphries is apparently getting vast quantities of hate mail at the Irish Times offices for this piece, which was published on the day of Wales-Ireland. Rugger buggers are such a civilised lot.

                                                    If you are Irish and you like rugby, you will be loving this entire grand-slam business. The old boys of 1948 getting dusted down and wheeled out. The big claims for rugby's centrality to Irish culture. The sense that a grand slam may be one last, grand blowout before the country throws itself down the economic garbage chute.

                                                    If you are Irish and indifferent to the rugger hullabaloo, well, you won't be short of company, either.

                                                    This has been an interesting month for Irish sport. For a few days at Cheltenham we masqueraded as “the racing Irish”, a loveable, all-drinking, all-wagering tribe of codgers pretending that they still had some money left. Here we come clutching a form guide and rosary beads in one hand and a creamy pint in the other. The sport of kings. It's in our blood, see.

                                                    Tuesday was St Patrick's Day and Croke Park hosted the All-Ireland club hurling and football finals. If there is a unit of Irish sport that feels itself securely tied to the soul of the nation, it is the GAA.

                                                    And then this weekend the stage is boisterously commandeered by the rugby people - big, bluff practitioners of a sport that a rabid RTE commentator asserted a couple of years ago to be the “heartbeat of our nation”. It was a claim that set many of us sniggering into our skinny cappuccinos. You either love rugby or loathe rugby, but in Ireland it is also possible to ignore it, even in a week such as this.

                                                    Rugby is slowly changing its demographic and the success of Munster, in particular, has provided a sort of gateway drug for those who wish to explore matters farther. For many of us, however, it is too late. We grew up in a time when rugby in Dublin and in Ulster was the preserve and the sporting means of self-expression for the privileged classes.

                                                    Even in other regions the game was, as the great Irish writer Breandán ÓhEithir put it, “distinguished from other popular sports by the fact that it was played by Protestants and by the sons of the small-town businessmen who had been sent to the rugby- playing academies of Blackrock, Castleknock and Clongowes Wood, to ensure that they were kept a cut above the buttermilk that surrounded them at home and to make useful business connections”.

                                                    Irish rugby remains a sport from which generations of us have felt excluded and disenfranchised. Whatever happens in Wales today, it will be a private function. A large swath of us will be at home watching something else or doing something else, not out of ill will but just because rugby does not concern us or stir us. The game does not still the nation in the way that Ireland football matches in World Cup finals do, clearing those streets that have previously been festooned with flags and bunting. And rugby does not stir that deep, atavistic pride inside us like an All-Ireland hurling final.

                                                    Even rugby's high feast days leave lots of us cold. I was dispatched to see Ireland play France on the day when Croke Park belatedly opened itself up for business to foreign sports. My journalistic services were not needed for the England game a couple of weeks later, so I went to watch some hurling instead. I am glad my byline did not appear over some of the frothy foolishness that was committed to print and hurled down the airwaves that weekend. Corny, misplaced jingoism was dispensed in industrial quantities by people who should know better.

                                                    What a bizarre occasion of self-celebration that was. Rugby people at their hectoring and sanctimonious best, giving hard evidence to the old truth that as “a great sporting nation” we are merely a race of big-event addicts and international sport comes with the added incentive of giving us the chance to get a pat on the head from elsewhere. We are obsessed with seeing ourselves as others might see us, addicted to pointing out cloyingly our charm and our passion. Aren't we the greatest supporters in the world? Aren't we? Say we are. Puh-leese!

                                                    Lawdee! February 2007. What a time we had of it. The business of the Union Jack being run up a flagpole at Croke Park and of God Save the Queen being sung in the old place was held up to us peasantry and a bemused international audience as an example of how things should be done. Our little Mandela-Pienaar moment.

                                                    We were asked to stand back and let the rugby folk take care of the healing. The old oppressors' anthem had been played and the flag run up and down the timber many times during the Special Olympics at Croke Park a few years earlier and nobody had died of apoplexy, but this, we were told, was our history in the making, the final proof that as a nation we had matured.

                                                    The rugby chaps had done it. They had planted the flag on the peak of national adulthood. The final stage of our evolution as a race was complete. We were walking on two feet and with a straight back at last. And wearing blazers with shiny buttons.

                                                    Of course, we speak out of both sides of our mouths. Beating our new best friends, the English, at Croke Park was the least that could have been done for the GAA. The chaps had sorted out that nasty old Bloody Sunday business once and for all, given payback for the days when the English took the corn out of our foamy mouths while the spuds rotted in the fields and soothed the seething peasantry who were gathered somewhere else in a parish hall, brandishing cudgels and scythes and baying about the f**in' Brits being in the good field again.

                                                    Cry god for Croker, Ireland and the oval ball, one reporter concluded before passing out in a state of religious ecstasy. There was plenty more guff to the tune of rugby being the heartbeat of our nation and this being a point that divided our history in two. The rest of us expressed our maturity by placing our tongues between our lips and exhaling so as to make farting noises.

                                                    But the truth is that all Irish sports need occasional sips of this nationalist soma to sustain themselves. An Ireland win today would be a nice punctuation mark to place at the end of the bizarrely vulgar Celtic Tiger years, but perhaps the real measure of our maturity, as a sporting nation at least, will come when we can play games without the constant need for external validation and self-congratulation.

                                                    Meanwhile, good luck to the boys. Some of us will be passionately checking Teletext later to see how ye got on.

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