TIPPING POINT:There can't be any real argument about Heineken's rugby success. What other major sports event is known not by its proper title but the sponsor?

WELL DONE Leinster, and well done Chelsea. But especially well done to the real weekend winners, Heineken’s advertising bods. They produced a real result. This corner came damn close to having a pint of Hydrogen.

At another time in another life I earned a crust behind a bar dolloping out drink. I blame it for a subsequently low bullshit threshold. It’s like taxi-drivers: there are only so many times one can be asked “busy tonight?” without starting to work out possible alibis if suddenly disappearing with a customer, a shovel and a bag of lime.

Gags especially only really work first time out, a concept alien to the many, many drinkers at that time who used to request Mr Heineken’s finest with the unvarying phrase – “pint of Hydrogen, heh, heh”. The conviction that this was some form of Proustian word-play never dissipated, despite occasional appearances of a large shovel behind the counter.

So the allure of Hydrogen remained a mystery until the torrent of attention leading up to Saturday’s big game became too much. What have I been missing out on, I wondered. It isn’t just what guys from the local meat-processing factory drink: obviously it is rugby players too, big, butch, successful, uber-muscly paragons of masculinity who between matches spend their time fending off the elite products of Loreto and Mount Anville. It’s different now, respectable, cool even.

I resisted, mainly through a more prosaic cocktail of screaming children and a lack of time, but the temptation was there. Sponsorship nearly worked again, in this case the most successful sponsorship in sport – probably. See what I did there? Oh, right; that’s the other one.

Anyway, there can’t be any real argument about Heineken’s rugby success. What other major sports event is known not by its proper title but the sponsor? In racing, there are Hennessy Gold Cups of various hues, but that’s about it. Only in rugby is the sponsor’s name so all-enveloping: which makes you wonder what the European Rugby Cup will be known as when drink sponsorship is eventually banned.

You can fill in your own cartoon rugby prejudices here at your leisure. There’s plenty of time, no immediate rush. Government doesn’t work like that. Sports Minister Leo Varadkar pointed that out when putting junior health Minister Róisín Shortall back in her box last week. She had asserted that Government is determined to ban drink company sponsorship of sports events. Leo said no decision has yet been taken, and even if the eventual answer is yes to a ban, it will take time to implement, lots of time. So, there’s no immediate threat to Hydrogen.

It’s likely to happen at some stage, though. The Hydrogen Cup is known as the “H Cup” in France because of a sponsorship ban there. That’s the trend. The drinks companies know it. So, too, do the sports bodies that are so eager for all that easy sponsorship moolah.

And on the face of it, it is ridiculous having drinks companies profiting on flogging an illusion that tucking into several gallons of hooch will aid your athleticism and at the same make you irresistible to your sex of choice. It’s bullshit. It’s sponsorship. It’s style.

But is it harmful? Only the most challenged of intellects can equate getting ratted with running faster for longer. And it’s hard to avoid the suspicion that those unfortunates possessed of both an addictive personality and a hollow leg will find some way of satisfying their compulsion whether Jamie Heaslip is throwing shapes on a poster or not.

It’s certainly not like cigarette sponsorship. Fags might be enjoyable for a while but nobody can claim they are anything but harmful to you. However, the vast majority manage to enjoy a glass of something without feeling an overwhelming need to tip the bottle to their quivering lips and guzzling uncontrollably.

But in many ways banning stuff is a triumph of show too. As Bill Hicks pointed out long ago, governments only objects to drugs which they can’t tax. And banning them hasn’t prevented much of the world happily getting a little toasted every now and again.

During long periods of the Champions League final, sparking up something might have aided wakefulness as Chelsea soaked like Oliver Reed and Bayern attacked like Elton John. But while style might have been lacking, the substance of Chelsea’s victory was immense. Cribbing about how Chelsea are only the sixth best team in England right now, and managed to effectively bore their way to victory over both Barcelona and Bayern, can’t disguise how the likes of Lampard, Cech, and Drogba, when he isn’t falling down, are eminently worthy European champions.

In their pomp, only some outrageous Liverpool luck prevented them going all the way to the Champions League final, but that’s the nature of football, just as Bayern and Barcelona will feel blackguarded this time.

That’s what makes the game so endlessly fascinating. Resilience and grit might not be particularly sexy attributes. They’re not showy and certainly don’t feature on too many ads. But try winning anything without them.

Dismissing optics completely is dangerous, though. For one thing they can represent the aspirational within us, the way we choose to see ourselves and crucially, the way others view us.

The depths of inadequacy that allowed human beings walk into a pub in Loughinisland 18 years ago and shoot dead six people watching the Ireland-Italy World Cup match just because they were Catholic can only be guessed at. Remembering the victims is an entirely good thing. The FAI’s decision to commemorate them by wearing black armbands for the Euro 2012 match against Italy next month isn’t.

Also on June 18th it will be 40 years since the IRA planted a bomb in a derelict house in Lurgan which killed three British soldiers. And since this is Ireland, with our nasty, bitter history of sectarian division, an obvious conclusion for those admittedly aching to arrive at it will be that the FAI views one group of victims as more important than another.

In the circumstances the football link is too tenuous. Yes, it’s Italy, and yes, it’s the same date. But this is Ireland. Politically every move is parsed to within an inch of its life.

It’s hard to credit the FAI hierarchy didn’t think of those wider political implications before going to Uefa with the idea. It’s even harder to believe Uefa didn’t twig the precedent being set.

The sad substantial reality is that inadequacy knows no borders, no religious or ethnic divisions, and no timeframe.