We awoke in Edinburgh, with the feeling of injured disbelief of someone who has just been headbutted by the Pope and finished off on the ground by machete-wielding Little Sisters of the Infant Jesus. Did we really see what we saw? Across the city, people stirred incredulously in their beds, heads thudding. We thought again; and then the Scottish morning air moved with the groans of lamenting Irish rugby supporters, lowing like cattle with their hooves in gin traps.
Is there no limit to the masochism of us Irish rugby supporters? Is it possible that we will endlessly and robotically march to watch the Irish national team, regardless of the outcome, into some vast indefinite future, wherein the IRFU coffers grow indefinitely fatter, and we grow indefinitely poorer?
Is this equation possible? If it is, it must surely violate Newton's laws of physics, about all systems having a fixed amount of energy. The IRFU has no energy; so it draws on ours, and we willingly surrender it, yet have more to give whenever the lords of IRFU demand it. And for nothing in return. Absolutely nothing in return.
Baffled and rueful
It makes no sense. It violates every canon of the commercial rule-book. Yet it is the deal we agree to. We pay large amounts of money, year after year after year after year, to an organisation which inhales cash like an industrial suction pump. And the lords of IRFU honour their part of the contract by - well, to tell you the truth, I don't know what they do. They run an Edwardian football stadium, that's what they do, and they employ various managers who look variously baffled and sad and rueful, scratching their heads in wonder at each latest disaster, down the sorrowful decades.
Yet no matter how badly the Irish team does, people pay to see it. This is insanity. This is the principle of the Gethin good removed from the margins of economic theory and placed centrefield. The Gethin good - the word is not in my dictionary, and its spelling here is dependent upon my memory of a Finola Kennedy lecture in UCD one morning at 9 a.m. some time around the Relief of Ladysmith, me still in my pyjamas, dozing, and showing her a fine pair of tonsils every half minute or so - is an odd creature. It violates a central tenet of the laws of supply and demand, for demand for a Gethin good rises as its price increases. This is because a Gethin good is so vital to the welfare of its purchaser that a price rise causes the unfortunate to abandon less vital purchases, and instead to focus instead on buying more Gethinery.
The Gethin principle must now be enlarged to include IRFUnomics. This is predicated on the notion that you can continue to provide a service which achieves absolutely nothing to those who pay large amounts for it, not just for the brief regime during which any con artist can remove the life-savings of the credulous, the stupid or the recently sledgehammered, but almost indefinitely, down the decades.
Boredom and shame
I said "achieves nothing", but that is ludicrously untrue. For, at a very high price, IRFUnomics can provide you with boredom, incredulity, shame, anger, bitterness, and all the other emotional and intellectual sensations most people would pay large amounts of money to avoid. This is what makes it bizarre; generally speaking, you don't go to a sporting event to be bored, incredulous, ashamed, stupefied, angered, embittered, any more than you go to a bus stop in order for the driver to park a wheel on your foot.
It seems IRFUnomics works in a world of mysterious forces which result in the paying public violating all the accepted canons of human behaviour. If the Harvard School of Business Studies discovered the bizarre rules of IRFUnomics, it would simply close down and reopen as a creche instead, on the basis of: What's the point?
So what is the point? Why do Irish rugby supporters follow the Irish rugby team across Europe, though we unfailingly know the outcome to this Groundhog Day? At best we can hope for a win over a minor team early in the season, the equivalent of a Nissan Micra beating a Model T. On that basis, we then start talking about the chances of our Micra walloping a brace of Ferraris steered by Schumachers at Monaco.
Indefatiguable optimism
This is the central law of IRFUnomics; it is based on the indefatigable optimism of the Irish rugby punter, the grinning idiot who yearly forks out hundreds of £s to see Ireland being trounced by teams of Eskimos with frostbite, charwomen with housemaid's knee, Chelsea Pensioners' Passchendaele Veterans and the Dundee Infirmary for Distressed Protestant Ladies.
Here is the truth. A team manager who changes both his half-backs during a match has about as much as a game plan as an earthworm has designs for a satellite tracking station. In the real world, the contemptible travesties we endured in Scotland last Saturday, or against Wales in Lansdowne Road last year, would have been rewarded by a lynch mob and IRFU heads on the city walls. Instead, there was, yet again, the weary, red-eyed stoicism inspired by IRFUnomics.
Well, for one sucker, not any more. It's over for me. This is a promise. I am never, ever going to see an Irish rugby international again in my entire life. I'm also giving up alcohol, sex, coffee, lie-ins, late nights and tea. And most of all, IRFUnomics .