The happy heads on the rugby lads in the RTÉ studio on Saturday weren’t a match at all for the happy heads on the ladies who’d just run their way into the 4x400m women’s relay final at the World Athletics Championship in Budapest, Hungary.
Seriously, the only time that Jerry, Jamie and Simon — as in Flannery, Heaslip and Zebo — seemed genuinely happy was when presenter Daire O’Brien tossed in the fact ahead of the Ireland-Samoa match that England had lost to Fiji. Yes, Fiji!
“Let me get out the violin!” quipped Heaslip, not at all concealing his glee at the fate that has befallen the English ahead of the Rugby World Cup. Zebo was singing from the same hymn sheet it must be said. “That’s a very good result [for Fiji], there’s a few happy faces around,” added Zebo in offering his tuppence worth.
This so-called summer series of internationals could have done with a marketing rebrand given the state of the weather, with O’Brien likening the conditions down in Bayonne to the sort of rain you’d more likely find in a Heineken pool match in the depths of winter and he wasn’t wrong.
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Anyway, there was talk among the lads of how this Rugby World Cup had come in under the radar with none of the players’ faces on billboards that had accompanied past tournaments where expectations time and time again were flattened.
As O’Brien put it in going over to live coverage of Ireland’s final warm-up game before the real thing in a couple of weeks’ time, it was about looking for “a win, no red cards and no injuries”.
If they say two out of three ain’t bad, it was the injury to Cian Healy — on his 125th international appearance at that — which cast something of a cloud over the whole affair.
“He’s in trouble,” co-commentator Donal Lenihan had observed to Hugh Cahill when the teak-tough Healy struggled to get off the ground and had to be assisted off the field. “This is just what you don’t want to see,” said Cahill and, although we couldn’t see his face, we knew it wasn’t a happy one.
Back in the studio at half-time, with Ireland trailing, the match result seemed almost irrelevant to the lads who definitely didn’t have happy heads and the grins that had been there in sweet-talking Fiji’s win over England at the start of the programme had disappeared.
“I’m not a lip reader, but it looked like he was saying some choice words,” said Heaslip of his former team-mate’s demeanour to the two men carrying him away from the action.
Given the weekend that was in it with England’s loss to Fiji and the All Blacks’ mind-blowingly massive defeat at the hands of the Springboks (who of course are in Ireland’s group at the World Cup), there is a look about the lads of Ireland adding to what O’Brien called a “weird” results sequence.
But they didn’t, even if the win wasn’t exactly greeted with much fanfare or trumpeting or even violins by the quartet in Montrose.
“They will forget about this game as quickly as possible, they got out of Dodge … it’s onwards and upwards,” said O’Brien.
Zebo nodded. “There’s loads to improve on, it’s not the end of the world,” said Simon and there was a hint of a smile. There was.
But absolutely nothing to match the happy heads on the four women — Sophie Becker, Kelly McGrory, Róisín Harrison and Sharlene Mawdsley — who qualified for the world final of the 4x400m relay. Make that five happy heads because Virgin Media interviewer Will Dalton was delighted for the four runners and their positive energy added further radiance to the stadium in Budapest.
“It’s like an out-of-body experience,” said McGrory in trying to describe the feeling of what had just happened.
And Mawdsley — who had possibly seen more track time than anyone in the whole of the championships in competing in three different events and reaching two finals — exuberated what it all meant: “I love this team through and through.”
And rightly so.
