WHEN DID we all start giving a fig about filthy rugby? Look, I understand that there has long been a tradition of working-class rugby in Ireland – notably in Limerick – but, let’s be honest, for most of the past few centuries the sport has been the preserve largely of heavy-drinking male BMW drivers. You know what I’m getting at. The sorts of chaps who, at weekends, wear implausibly clean blue jeans with brown leather shoes.
At some point in the last decade, however, a decree went out that rugby was to become the new official State religion.
Wan urchins, Gucci junkies, frail widows, thieving vagabonds: every demographic is now expected to know the difference between a drop goal and, erm, something else in filthy rugby.
The absurd reverence for this sport finally registered with me when an e-mail arrived complaining about my review of the recent Irish film Rewind.
In a characteristically facetious aside, I described Amy Huberman, the nifty film’s star, as being married to “that basketball player (or whatever)”.
Now, over the past decade, I have made the most disgraceful remarks about Melanie Griffith’s brain, Nicole Kidman’s current face and the overall woodenness of Matthew McConaughey.
I once compared Russell Crowe to an ambulatory slagheap. Nobody has ever complained (not about these things, anyway). My vapid pretence to ignorance as regards Mr Huberman’s profession was, however, “a smart-ass comment too far, and (unintentionally, I assume) disrespectful to Brian O’Driscoll”.
Really? The man gets kicked in the head for a living. He can surely endure some witless hack faking ignorance of the reasons behind his divine status.
We seem to have exchanged one class of forelock tugging for another. You can say what you like about priests and bishops. Burn an effigy of your local bank manager and you will, most likely, quickly attract a horde of admiring supporters. But all criticism of O’Driscoll or the other bloke – you know, the bald one with the ears – is strictly frowned upon.
Quentin Crisp, pondering negative attitudes to homosexuality, once quoted an amusing anecdote about a man who didn’t like peas. “I’m glad I don’t like them, because if I liked them I would eat them and I hate them,” the chap was supposed to have said. Crisp’s point was that if you find the idea of something unpalatable then just allow others to enjoy it and don’t fret about how horrid it seems to you. This is very good advice that, when considering filthy rugby, I intend to fully ignore.
It’s so drearily slow. Surely, the joy of playing sport with a ball is that the game progresses at the pace of the hurtling sphere or ellipsoid. In filthy rugby, the players actually carry the blasted object up and down the rain-sodden field.
When they’re not making like shoppers running for the bus with a recently purchased parcel they’re all lying grumpily on top of the thing. Is there anything less aesthetically pleasing in sport than the gruesome spectacle of the filthy rugby scrum? What do we make of a game that invariably begins with the attacking team booting the ball out of play? It all adds up to a celebration of strategic negativity and sluggish ill grace.
Oh, who am I trying to kid? The true reasons for my distaste for filthy rugby are rooted in prejudice and bitter childhood experience. Don’t get me wrong. I had an extremely happy upbringing.
It’s just there was a little too much filthy rugby in it. You have no idea – honestly, no idea – how important that sport is to the middle-class communities of Belfast and Limerick.
To say a lack of interest in filthy rugby is viewed as evidence of unimaginable eccentricity is to understate the case. Such a blind spot is regarded as a symptom of derangement.
Growing up in those two cities, when admitting ignorance of some recent Irish triumph, I found myself looking into faces contorted with terrified bewilderment. A call for the men with butterfly nets always seemed a possibility.
Quite properly, being a contrarian, I found my indifference towards filthy rugby – so boring it’s more boring than most other sports – hardening into genuine hostility. For most of the succeeding decades, it proved no challenge to avoid the ghastly business. If you stayed away from men in camel car coats (later, men in Barbour jackets) you could easily sidestep discussion of the oval ball.
Then something happened. Blame the decline in religion. Blame the advance of the middle classes. It seems we are all filthy rugby fans these days. How did we let this happen?