You know it's a special day when nobody wants to leave the ground. And that's how it was at Lansdowne Road on Saturday. The Irish players wanted to lap it up for as long as possible, and so an impromptu lap of honour has rarely caught the mood so well. Even that wasn't enough. It was as if everybody wanted to linger just a little bit longer.
It takes a lot to stop thousands of Irish people from going to the pub, but that's how it was this famous day. Everybody wanted to stay in this storied old ground and, assuredly, this story will rank right up alongside the best of them.
The old place was fairly rocking as U2's Pride blasted out over the P.A. system, and there seemed to be enough Irish pride in the air at Lansdowne Road to reach out and bite into it. Perhaps too much can be extracted from a sporting event, but amid so much gloom - September 11th and its fall-out, the Aer Lingus crisis, the bleak economic prognosis, etc. - the Irish rugby team seemed to illuminate some of our lives.
The presentation of the championship to England was utterly out of place. Nobody wanted this, least of all the English players. Having refused to leave the sanctuary of the visitors' dressing-room on that sodden day in Murrayfield when their previous Grand Slam attempt failed, it would have been entirely understandable had they done so again.
He who pays the piper calls the tune and so Lloyds TSB had their post-match poses for the cameras. Ridiculous it looked too. Martin Johnson accepted the trophy perfunctorily. At least the crowd afforded the sheepish-looking flock of Englishmen a round of applause borne, one suspects, out of sympathy as much as anything else. In Murrayfield they would have gleefully laughed at them.
With that the crowd still wouldn't go, for how could they after shouting themselves hoarse and in that nerve-jangling finale up until a few minutes before. Truly the Lansdowne Road crowd constituted a 16th man as sheer Irish will kept England out.
England having slumped off Wood was applauded when he climbed the hastily arranged podium on half-way for no obvious purpose, and then everybody laughed when he walked back down again. He paused, and the players and the crowd waited to see what Wood would do next. He seemed at a loss himself, before shrugging his shoulders and reluctantly leading his fellow slam-busters off.
"There have been some great moments with Ireland and the Lions along the way, but this was the best of my rugby life," declared Wood afterwards. "We've worked so hard and it meant so much. To see 47,000 Irish supporters stay so long after the final whistle to soak it all in and to remember the feeling, it was a fantastic day." Wood's only rugby picture in his home is of a scene in the 1994 visitors' dressing-room in Twickenham, when he was an unused replacement in Ireland's last win over England. "I certainly intend to add to that now. My try was of absolutely nil consequence, but hopefully someone will have captured the wonderful emotion of it all at the end."
Typical of England's truly magnanimous post-match reaction was of Lawrence Dallaglio interrupting one of Warren Gatland's many post-match interviews to congratulate him. With that Gatland let out a big sigh. "A pretty special day, wasn't it?" he was asked. "Woody spoke to the players about playing for a team, not just for the 15 but for the 22 and the management, and I think that's what the last few weeks have been about," the coach said. "We all took a bit of stick after Scotland, and it was about believing we could beat England. The crowd was just awesome, and to see the players do a lap of honour, that's what makes sport special and that's what makes these occasions special. And those are things you don't forget."
Mick Galwey, a colossus once more, now has three wins out of six against England. Success follows him around as if on a lead and at half-time he hammered home the need for belief, that this team was good enough to beat England, and that it was going to require an incredible amount of effort. "In fairness to the players," said Gatland, "they gave it". The two discordant notes were the injuries sustained by Brian O'Driscoll and David Humphreys. O'Driscoll strained lateral ligaments in his knee and tore tendons in an index finger. The extent of the injuries and the possible need for surgery has yet to be established so his fitness is very much up in the air, but he must be doubtful for Leinster's meeting with Newport next Friday.
Likewise Humphreys for Ulster's clash away to Stade Francais next Saturday. The extent of the damage to the players' backs from all the slapping as they left the field has yet to be analysed.
They weren't too hurried about leaving the arena all the same. The players wanted to milk the moments and it was 6 p.m., well over an hour after the game had ended, by the time the management and captain attended their post-match press conference. Invariably, Wood had led a rendition of From Clare to Here in his trademark valedictory song in the dressing-room, whereupon Brian O'Brien was prevailed upon to lead a hearty singing of the Munster squad anthem, Stand Up and Fight.
They were all heroes, not least the replacements, and of them particularly Ronan O'Gara. The 60th minute, a penalty to Ireland, Humphreys hobbling off, cometh the hour and all that. No bother to the kid. "I'd just about stopped myself singing along with the crowd. You get caught up in the emotion of it all. We decided to go for a run and then I saw David was down, and I was called in. Then Woody says 'will you kick this?' and I said 'yeah'. You just try and concentrate on technique. Your legs are dead, I wasn't fully stretched. The divot went pretty far," laughed O'Gara, "but the ball went farther. I was supposed to have fresh legs", O'Gara said of his 20-plus minutes on the pitch, "but the ball didn't seem to go out of play and I don't know how the lads defended like that for 80 minutes".
A great day. A really enjoyable, gut-wrenching, emotionally draining, no-holds-barred, breathtaking game of high drama. This one will enter the annals of this storied old ground. Amid all the state-of-the-art stadia, Lansdowne Road is a decrepid old ground, but when it's full to capacity and an English side seeking a Grand Slam have just been put to the sword, it's the best ground in the whole wide world.
