The manager of the Couch Sports Bar in Lisbon was insouciance personified as he brushed past the collection of anxious punters, who looked longingly down the stairwell at a locked door. Time didn’t stand still, but it did appear to crawl as more faces joined the throng on Saturday morning awaiting the advertised 11am admittance.
Phones were regularly rechecked. At 10.59, a bolt turned, the door was pushed open. There was a cartoon element to the descent, the mass of bodies resembling a shoal of sprat moving in harmony, as they swam through the door. Punters turned into proprietors, taking stools down off the bar counter and tables.
There were more than a dozen televisions including a snug called the “Samsung stadium”. People grabbed a preferred vantage point. Undaunted, the bar manager/owner offered a Portuguese version of the Spanish “mañana” attitude, or “depois logo se vê” in the local tongue, which translates as “we’ll deal with it later”.
Slow Lions build-up finally culminates in Test week
He surveyed the crowd, performed two or three chores before rummaging to find a remote control to turn on televisions, one by one. The hyperventilation was palpable, customers only exhaled when the Lions match burst into life on the screens.
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Even then he refused to turn off the booming pub tunes. No commentary, but no one seemed to care. Alone he stood behind the bar, one pair of hands to accommodate the never-ending slew of orders from the first to last minute. The special was five Moscow Mules for the price of four. A sign read “no table service”. There weren’t too many other rules.
In some respects, the scene offered a microcosm of rugby in Portugal, accommodating but overwhelmed by the detail of modern Test rugby and not just on the pitch. The only media access to Portugal head coach Simon Mannix was after the Captain’s Run at 5pm on the Friday. The New Zealander and his forwards coach Andy Kyriacou were once of Munster, so there was an obvious interest.
Antonio, the Portuguese media liaison, was very helpful and obliging in so many ways, as were his acolytes, but there was no sense that a Test match against Ireland was a coveted opportunity to publicise the game to a wider audience. There were no match programmes, and on the eve of the game it came to light that no match clock or shot clock, in placekicking terms, had been organised.
Judging by the fact that what was eventually produced resembled an advertising hoarding to the extreme back left of one end of the stadium – it also served as the scoreboard – it appeared to have been a rush job. Matters were compounded further during the Test when the communications link from referee Adam Leal to television match official Matteo Lipperini dropped in the first half, never to be restored.
Ironically, one of the only times that it functioned was to deny Portugal fullback Nuno Sousa Guedes a try for a forward pass in the build-up. Anecdotally the Portugal Rugby union operates on a financial shoestring, five full-time employees or thereabouts. It’s also reflected in the stewarding, smiling and helpful but carried out with minimal numbers, one per entrance to the stand.
Moving the match to the iconic 37,000-capacity Estádio Nacional do Jamor was a misstep. The official word was that 8,000 tickets had been sold. The crowd on the day, dominated by Ireland jerseys, looked appreciably smaller.
The momentum generated by Portugal’s brilliant performances in the 2023 World Cup appears to have dissipated alarmingly, and it’s not just in the 106-7 skelping they received on Saturday. Georgia are much further down the road in rugby terms.
And yet it didn’t really compromise the enjoyment of being in Lisbon at the same time as one of Europe’s biggest music festivals, NOS Alive. It probably helps to be of a certain vintage. Muse and Olivia Rodrigo were the only two of 112 acts that I recognised. One member of the media expressed an interest in seeing DJ Boring.
Lisbon has an innate charm, the cobbled streets and narrow footpaths that climb from the sea to the bohemian Bairro Alto neighbourhood housing tapas bars and clubs. There’s something for everyone. The city has a young presence in tourist terms as much as the older traveller. In Portugal hash is decriminalised for personal use, up to five grammes.
At night, in many areas where there’s a vibrant nightlife, you’d struggle to walk 200 metres without being offered it, or another narcotic that’s definitely not legal. There are other attractions, and you can be taken there in Lisbon’s versions of souped-up tuk-tuk style carriages, albeit on a much grander scale.
Some of the Ireland players and management headed for Oitavos Dunes on Thursday to enjoy some downtime, the only Portuguese course to be ranked in the top 100 golf courses of the world by Golf Magazine, a beautiful multilayered venue that takes in views of the Sintra mountains and the visually arresting coastline that wraps around Cascais Bay – basically a mix of sand dunes, umbrella pines and high cliffs.
On the Saturday night, Ireland players, partners, family and friends escaped their hotel for a little while and headed to the famous “Pink Street” – so called because the road surface is a vivid pink colour – that houses a mishmash of bars, clubs and eateries beloved of both the locals and tourists.
They partied in to the wee hours, the rugby season finally over, but also in recognition of a successful tour, relatively speaking, where individual development rather than results was of greater import.
