When William Webb-Ellis was but a young cove at Rugby school, as we all know, one day he picked the ball up and ran with it. A Tipperary friend assures me that when asked why he had so flagrantly broken the rules of football, he replied: "Because that's the way we play it at home, Sir." Home for the Webb-Ellises, my Tipperary friend assures me, was Nenagh. Young William was speaking of the native variety of football, to which he was kindly introducing the English.
So clearly, rugby shouldn't be called rugby at all, but Nenagh.
Furthermore, it is obviously not a foreign game, but an Irish one, though with some English manners attached to it - rather like an Irish infantry regiment in the British army. Moreover, those other similarities - the goals, the numbers in the teams, the field culture of order out of chaos, and up until recently, the obsessive amateurishness which drove both sports - suggest similar roots. Tipperary roots. One wonders, given that rugby is such an Irish game, that the MCC hasn't introduced a ban on cricketers playing it.
Single stadium
Now, I have a simple rule in life. When in doubt, look at how the French do it. The French have a single stadium in Paris, where they play their nenagh, their soccer and whatever variety of native football they have: L'AAG, L'Association Athletique Gallique. One stadium for all the codes. It makes sense to the French. Why should it not make sense to us?
For so long it didn't because our history was so very different, and different currents found such powerful expressions in sport. Nenagh - or rugby, as it is improperly known - was the sport of the middle-class urban types; very British army, either unionist or apolitical. Gaelic was for the nationally-minded rural lads who would no more play rugby (because, of course, they didn't know it was in fact nenagh) than they would sing God save the Queen; their tapestry was seamless. And soccer was for the working-class boys in garrison towns, who learned their sport from watching British soldiers. The most despised of all the sports as being neither nationally minded or possessing the right social eclat, soccer was all the more worshipped for its isolation and its relative powerlessness. You played soccer, in part, because you were proud of what you were - the poorest of the poor.
Players now move effortlessly between the codes. Kevin Moran played both soccer and GAA; so did Martin O'Neill. Some of our most brilliant nenagh players have GAA pedigrees. And far from GAA suffering from lifting the ban on foreign codes, it has never been healthier - though it does seem to be the case that soccer and nenagh players seldom make the journey that GAA players make into other sports.
Administrators
So much for the players. The administrators, that now, is another matter entirely. Rugby is attached to Lansdowne Road with a tribal loyalty. Somewhere buried in the genes of the men who run and love the game is the memory of all those young athletes who gathered at Lansdowne Road one day in 1914 and who were destined to leave their young bones in Gallipoli, the Somme, Flanders. Across the Liffey, they have other memories, of Crossley tenders machine-gunning a blameless crowd. And soccer, the only partitioned major sport in Ireland, is also the only homeless one, roosting in squats and dreaming of a place of its own.
No doubt the FAI determination to build its own stadium is no more than the dream of a pauper to live in his own palace - a determination only reinforced by the Government's niggardly and unworthy refusal to compensate it for the cost of postponing the Yugoslav matches at Government insistence. Its desire to stay aloof from the new national stadium is folly, an adolescent tantrum being turned into a policy for life. But that argument is distracting our attention from another consideration: the location of the new national stadium.
Who actually wants a stadium in the middle of nowhere, walking distance from nowhere, next to no pubs or restaurants, a concrete heap surrounded by a vast car-park, convenient to Dunsink tiphead but not much else? Neither the IRFU nor the GAA has fully committed itself to playing matches in the new stadium. Does the IRFU genuinely relish the day when international rugby matches will be played so far from the city centre? No, it doesn't. And do the GAA people really want to to play there? They don't, and they don't expect to either: their welcome for the new stadium is polite, diplomatic flummery. They've got the ground they want and love, and they simply will not host major matches in that windswept wilderness beyond Blanchardstown. It just won't happen.
Croke Park
With the right amount of political will and common sense, Croke Park could be the national stadium, right in Dublin city centre. That the Government is awash with money is no argument for committing us to a folly which could have a dreadfully debilitating effect on sport for decades to come. Those who run nenagh and soccer and the GAA must now realise that they have a common interest in sharing a single outstanding venue in the heart of Dublin. The alternative, the sporting equivalent of a suburban shopping mall, is too awful to contemplate. Poor Webb-Ellis, on whose person the three sports converge, must be spinning in his grave.