SIDELINE CUT:There is a prevailing mood that Ireland has an obligation to match Munster's heroics when they face Argentina today, writes KEITH DUGGAN

LISTENING TO the despairing calls to arms emanating from the Irish rugby camp during the week, it is beginning to sound as though the national mood has infiltrated a sports team that was, little over a year ago, held up as the pride of Ireland.

The blazing combination of defiance and disrespect and confidence that a shadow Munster side carried on to Thomond Park against the All Blacks last Tuesday night has rightly been lauded as the one thing worth cheering in quite a while. The provincial players and exiles who wore the Munster shirt with such murderous commitment and ambition provided the most potent dressingroom talk that the Irish team could ask for.

Judging from the comments of several of Ireland's most decorated internationals, there is a prevailing mood that Ireland have an obligation to match Munster in terms of attitude and cussedness when they play Argentina today.

But it is worth returning to that magical and unexpected evening in Limerick on Tuesday night. If it were simple for the national team to replicate the Munster performance, then of course, they would do it. But it has to be recognised that everything about that All Blacks game was unique.

It marked a real and rare departure from the formulaic script of professional sport. For a start, it pitched the players in the Munster dressingroom into an entirely new situation. Shorn of practically all their Irish prime-time performers, the first team was made up of a few veterans of the international scene and others who have lived in the shadow of the heavyweight names who have stormed Europe in Munster colours. And although it may have been an understrength provincial side, they were hardly novice. After all, they had a proven performer at number 10 in Paul Warwick and lining out with the most prolific try scorer in All Blacks history is hardly the stuff of impoverishment. Sitting together, these players had one common motivation - to play out of their skins against the marquee team of international rugby - but an endless variety of private reasons.

One can only imagine what was running through the minds of Doug Howlett and his fellow New Zealanders. Careful management and player handling means that so much of the internal tensions running through all big sports teams stay just that way - inside. Munster may be champions of Europe and, as we have so often heard, a big happy place full of tremendous characters who like nothing more than a hearty laugh over a practical jape. But if that is true, then it stands to reason that there are just as many individuals who regularly feel frustrated or marginalised and caged up because they don't quite get the chance they feel their effort - and talent - deserves.

This may be the only chance that some of them will get to face an international side - Howlett's days on the world stage, for instance, have ended. And they weren't facing just any team. The universal expectation was that the All Blacks would atone for the sins of 1978, who instead of performing the haka might just have recited Jules Winnfield quoting Ezekiel in Pulp Fiction: "And you will know I am the Lord when I lay my vengeance upon you."

Deep down, the Munster players were forced to entertain - and then firmly reject - the possibility of being on the receiving end of a whipping. There is no question that fear can spur a team into an above-the-odds performance as effectively as any other motivation. And also, there was the realisation that this was a one-shot deal. The All Blacks were in town to pay tribute to - and to right - that 30-old anomaly to their international record.

Whatever about in the smoky days of amateurism, when hard drinking and hard hitting went hand in hand, the idea that any club team, even one as organised as Munster, could beat the All Blacks seemed outlandish. But for 76 minutes, it was in their hands.

And, of course, they did not beat them. The moral order of professionalism reasserted itself when New Zealand manufactured that late try. However, rattled they may have been, the visiting players at least had the poise to stay cool: they didn't really celebrate Joe Rokococo's morale-saving score. Instead, they behaved as if they knew it was coming all along. Perhaps they did.

To compete against the All Blacks, the Munster players had to be conditioned to the nth degree and their enduring resilience speaks volumes for the training regime in the club. But somehow, they managed to infuse the discipline and physical prowess of professionalism with the traditional bloody-minded abandon of the disappeared amateur era.

In the famous television footage of Christy Cantillon's 1978 try, you can see, in the corner of the screen, a jubilant fan tossing his duffle coat into the grey skies in a kind of madcap celebration. The old duffle was a hardy staple in the Irish winters of yore. It was slightly heavier than a buffalo hide to wear and had toggles tough enough to break fingers if you tried to prize them open too quickly. But they were warm as a sauna and generally lasted through about four different fashion cycles. That '78 duffle coat resides in the Munster rugby museum now.

If similar items were thrown into the air on Tuesday night, they may well have included haute couture overcoats and custom-designed hats from Ireland's best milliners - emblems of the so-called boom. With the cold wind of economic disaster beginning to blow hard, the parallels between contemporary Ireland and that of '78 have not been confined to a famous rugby match.

The flood of bad news and dire predictions has become almost comically grim - and always with the circus master's warning that the best has yet to come. Whatever happened to all that glamour and fast living we used to read about in the Sunday newspapers after Mass? Where have all the champions of Tigerdom disappeared? Where have you gone, Gavin Lambe Murphy . . . a nation turns its lonely eyes to you.

Man, it has all gone south. Even the rugby team has begun to play like it is 1988 all over again. Just over a year ago, this team spoke openly about the possibility of winning the World Cup. And it seemed bold and ambitious but not deluded. It may be the only time that an Irish team ever speaks publicly about winning a major global sports tournament. And this is an Irish team who, remember, were constantly told that Triple Crowns didn't really matter, that Grand Slams were just a second best and that the World Cup was everything.

That seems a long time ago now. And it is why the call to arms during the week has been so timely, with its echoes of Ciarán Fitzgerald's mid-1980s Lansdowne Road battle cry of "Where's your f***ing pride?"

We are back to an old familiar place where any win will do. Argentina could teach the Irish a thing or two about recession and in recent times, they have been only too happy to deliver lessons on rugby as well. So in these days of reduced ambition, a win against Argentina would come as a relief.

It would be something to see.

And needless to say, you still can: not so long ago, tickets for an attractive match like this would have been like the proverbial gold dust.

As of last night, returned tickets were still on sale. Sell-out houses are no longer guaranteed. The message from the Irish rugby camp is on the money: only they can find what has been lost.