Thomond Park, Limerick, on a freezing winter's day. Who's playing? Oh, please. We're only here to hook up with a relative who happens to be involved (okay, make that rabidly involved) with the Munster team. Munster have scaled another rugby peak against the odds and play their second European Cup final today, driven on by ordinary people, from dockers to doctors, who can inspire the team to victory. Kathy Sheridan on the extraordinary fans behind the Men in Red.
Thomond Park, Limerick, on a freezing winter's day. Who's playing? Oh, please. We're only here to hook up with a relative who happens to be involved (okay, make that rabidly involved) with the Munster team. And as we must amuse ourselves somehow, we take to admiring the Leinster coach. Matt Williams has to be the model for Blond Action Man. That thick, blond hair, those clear blue eyes, those gleaming teeth against that tanned, chiselled face, that Australian twang, that steely, authoritative air enhanced by the pop star-style mouthpiece.
"Who does he talk to through the mic?" squeaks a swooning female. To which a Munsterman raises one sceptical, untamed eyebrow and drawls: "Oh, he's probably on to his sponsors in Colgate and Brylcreem". Matt Williams kicked his team to both Celtic League and Inter-Provincial eminence this season and has just landed a big pile of dosh and new toys to keep him there, so he should care . . . But as a commentary on how Munster perceives the stereotypically effete, gin-and-tonic drinking, sheepskin-wearing, Beamer-driving, social climbing, Dublin 4-heads of Leinster rugby, it's as telling as any.
Entire forests have been stripped in the effort to explain what makes Munster rugby "different" to all that, so much so that it's not immune to its own bit of stereotyping.
But how does it manage to merge docker and doctor in a way hitherto unimaginable in Leinster? What motivates tens of thousands of ordinary, working-class, Munster people in their work shirts and anoraks - and sometimes, the one Sunday suit - to travel thousands of miles by air, boat, van and motorbike, to ever-remote European venues, at colossal cost and discomfort? With the country knocking itself stupid over a pack of obscenely-paid soccer players in Japan, who will analyse the X factor that has maybe 40,000 Irish and ex-patriot fans descending on Cardiff today, many ticket-less and bed-less, and desperate to see 15 mostly not-very-pretty lads square up to an English team in a sport commonly portrayed as the preserve of an elite few?
Australian Jim Williams, veteran of his country's World Cup winning team and now wing forward for Munster, is still shell-shocked by it. "I've played in a few stadiums around the world and we have good supporters at home, but the numbers here who follow the team, you wouldn't find better anywhere in the world, in any sport. They're absolutely fanatical. I find it hard to believe sometimes . . .
So what's it all about? Old wounds, old ghosts, old tribes, old loyalties. No prima donnas. No obscene sums of money. Ordinariness, honesty, a scorching hunger.
But there's more.
"If I go to an international, there is always a barrier between players and fans," says Limerick broadcaster Len Dineen. "I watch the Munster lads and you see the way they come on the field and make the supporters feel a part of it - which they are".
It's no coincidence. The iconic status of Munster coach Declan Kidney is not just down to leading the team on its epic European journey; he has also made a crusade of weaving the fans into that voyage, never forgetting that their awesome voice can lift a game as surely as an accurate belt of O'Gara's boot.
"We know we're nothing special as a team," he says, "but if we can bring a bit of honesty and hope into people in the way that we do what we do, and enjoy it for the short time we're here, I'd be happy with that."
To an outsider, that merry, mischievous, slagging, inter-mingling of management, players, parents, children and supporters, is remarkable. Joan Galwey, wife of Mick, the Munster captain, and mother of two little girls, notes that Munster rugby is "very pro-family and a lot of that would come from Declan". This from a woman who had never been to a rugby match before she met Mick and grew up in Millstreet, in GAA territory, "where you went to a match and went straight home afterwards".
But anyone still digging for the roots of the passion that bonds management, players and supporters, should look again at that anti-Dublin 4, siege mentality. Never under-estimate its potency.
Munster rugby roots lie in the working-class, sports-mad parishes of Limerick where babies ingested the knock-on rule with mother's milk. This is no stereotype. Anyone joining the 800-strong, 24-hour queue for final tickets at Musgrave Park in Cork or Thomond Park on Friday, May 18th, would have found painters, printers and dockers - and a lot of their children - in line.
Tom O'Dwyer, queueing with his wife, Teresa, at Thomond Park, claims with some conviction that there are three places in the world where rugby is played democratically: "New Zealand, Wales and Limerick - and not necessarily in that order". And while his mother mightn't watch a match, he says, she'd still know who won the Bateman Cup in 1928 (when Young Munster beat guess who).
Jude Malone, a taxi driver from Glenbook, sacrificed two shifts to queue with his 12-year-old son. "How do I explain it? Most of the Munster players here live next door to ordinary fellows, they went to school with them, still feel they're one of the lads, salute them in the streets." He remembers exactly where he was when John O'Neill tipped down the try against Castres in the semi-final. "The whole town was at a standstill. There was about 100 of us standing in the door of the Still House pub and another 50 looking in the window of the TV store. The minute he crossed the line, everyone suddenly scattered, women as well, running to book flights, to try and get tickets."
John English, a steward, has been standing guard at the gate for 17 hours now and he's happy to do it. He was a second row with St Mary's (aka the College of Surgeons for reasons we won't explore) in the late 1940s and 1950s. "I worked in the timber yard and when I went to the foreman about the job, the first question he asked was 'do you play rugby?' If you did, you were in."
Paul Foran is still in his paint-splashed overalls from the day before, exhausted and unshaven after queueing all night and anxious to get to work. "But I never enjoyed the crack so much. I've been a fan all my life and will be to the day I die. You can take my body but don't take my ticket," he says, clutching it to his heart.
Even the garda on duty, Dermot Brody, has followed the team twice to France this year, including Paris with his 14-year-old daughter, Ciara. They reckon you won't find many like them in Leinster rugby. "Leinster fans are Dublin fans," says Brody, and in Munster eyes, they are still firmly grounded in the private rugby schools and affluent club environs of Trinity, Lansdowne and Wanderers.
"We have the impression that Dubliners look down their noses at us," says Len Dineen. "That there's an arrogance, a supercilious way of looking at us. I'm from Limerick city, born and bred, but I'd be considered by them as from the country. We always felt that we had to be twice as good."
The thing is, they never doubted that they were twice as good, even when the Dublin 4-heads thought Irish rugby ended at Newlands Cross.
No more. "Leinster would beat the Celtic League and Inter-Pro trophies into a thimble to be where we are today," says one gleeful supporter. But vindication only started 11 years ago with the introduction of the All-Ireland League. Every AIL title bar two, has been scooped by a Munster club, a smack on the jaw that even the armchair selectors with blinkers and 14 Berkeley Court gins on them had to heed.
When Ireland got trashed 50-18 at Twickenham two years ago, there were four Munster men on the team. For the next match, there were eight.
MEANWHILE, the four top coaching positions at national level have been ceded to Munster men, including Kidney and his assistant Niall O'Donovan, for whom today will be their last outing with Munster.
They'll be leaving behind the vital back-room people, such as team manager Jerry Holland (with a day job as regional commercial manager with First Active); Feargal O'Callaghan, the 33-year-old fitness trainer and four-time national rowing champion ("the guys who play rugby think they go through pain - they have no idea"); Mark McManus, his assistant; and physiotherapist Kirsty Peacock, a 30-year-old Geordie who did her sports medicine post-grad in TCD, became "addicted" to Ireland and is now "just one of the lads". "We're always in the same kit. I'm never overtly feminine. It's like having 34 brothers really, we mind each other. You are an inherent part of the team. During a match, I watch where the boys last piled up on the pitch. Basically, I watch the last man up."
They're on 24-hour call.
They soldiered together as the Munster bandwagon grew from a handful of supporters to an unstoppable force; hurtling along with the team on its epic journey to European Rugby Cup (ERC) distinction; raising its game with every clash against the star-studded, billionaire-owned French and English clubs, forcing itself upright after every lousy, trophy-denying, refereeing decision; putting up with ludicrous venue choices by ERC management; beating sides such as Stade Français on French turf or Toulouse in sweaty Bordeaux in contests that could be compared to sending St Patrick's Athletic off to the Bernabeu stadium and trouncing Real Madrid.
No one denies that they have been devastated en route. Several times. Keith Wood talks about "a level of emotional scarring" left by Twickenham, when they lost the final two years ago. "I don't know that you get over it." That niggling ache you sense is called unfinished business. It says that for all the striving and heroics, there is still no tangible reward, either for themselves or those fanatical supporters or even to wave at those snakes in the grass who give them the "yeah, but you didn't win anything" two fingers. It has created a resolve that is unfathomable.
And today is the day. Along for the ride are the Leinster lassies who sat admiring Matt Williams in a chilly Thomond Park five months ago.
We earned our spurs by getting to the semi-final against Castres in April (mainly because the south of France isn't freezing, isn't Thomond Park and the rabid one found us tickets).
The conversion was swift but subtle. At Shannon for the outward flight, a player's mother sized up my young daughter as a possible match for her son. Then we found ourselves buying a bodhran. What else do you do when 10,000 fellow travellers seem composed entirely of parents, siblings, friends and neighbours of players and they all have one?
In France, they crowded into the streets and squares, and fled to other bars when the ones they were in ran out of beer; Munster lads didn't get where they are today by being gin-and-tonic wussies. They got confused from time to time. Early Saturday morning, one lad managed to find the Ibis hotel and the correct room number, only to discover too late for the terrorised Frenchman inside - "Ah Tadgh, Tadgh! Jaze, will y'open the door, will ya ope . . Jaze. Who're who?" - that it was the wrong Ibis.
At a taxi rank late that night, war seemed inevitable when two muscular local boyos jumped the queue and a Munster lad unleashed a string of internationally-recognised expletives. The bigger of the two - let's call him Maurice - prepared to rip out his liver but first, took care to remove his elegant sweater. A ripple of laughter floated up the queue. Then he made to remove his vest; the ripple grew, turned to outright hilarity and suddenly, downtown Montpellier was rocking to a mightychorus of An Poc are Buile. Maurice didn't need the cupla focail to get the score. He grinned and slunk away.
That was our Damascene moment. Next day, we found ourselves wearing red caps, with bells on. And battering on the bodhran. And getting choked up when at three points down and another Munster dream seemed about to die in the French dust, the heart-broken fans launched into a defiant, spine-tingling, stadium-silencing rendition of The Fields of Athenry.
And laughing, when at the chaotic airport, the queueing hordes burst into jubilant snatches of La Marseillaise whenever a Frenchman appeared. And watching the legendary bond between supporters and team made manifest as players and management joined the check-in queue and sweated with the rest of us.
We were hooked, on the bandwagon, signed up members of the Mighty Monsters \.
So we're back, with the bodhran and the bells. But oh God. What if they lose? Len Dineen has been there, done that. "I play golf in Kilrush and there's a retired farmer who plays off a 28 handicap. And when he misses a shot, he says: 'Sure what harm . . . There's no cow dead'."