You don't have to be a plucky underdog to be Irish, but it helps

FOR reinforced stereotype of the week, look no farther than this: the Irish are happy only when they’re underdogs. In other words, stick an Irish team up against some giant of the sport and they’ll set about them like dogs on a sausage.

But put an Irish team up against a country no bigger than Louth, with a stadium the size of a garage forecourt and a goalkeeper picked out of the crowd, and they’ll go to pieces.

We won against Armenia on Wednesday, but not without a fight against ourselves. The team went two up thanks to almost comical good fortune, at which point they began playing with the dexterity of newborn foals.

It followed a weekend in which the nation had woken up at 6am to see the Ireland rugby team take on Wales, in the hope that we could actually win the competition, only to be out before the toast had popped. Again there was the notion that we would have been better not having gone in as even marginal favourites. Read the press in advance and afterwards: it hammers this home. Before the Australia match, one of their players, the former Leinster hero Rocky Elsom, wrote that “Ireland doesn’t need to be written off to perform well, but I’d say it helps”, which sums up the theme. In much of the Twitter comment at half-time, many supporters professed a relief we were behind. We got to be underdogs again.

In the Celtic Tiger era, both the soccer and rugby teams developed a public contempt of the inferiority complex. They looked to those in other sports – notably golf – where Irish were comfortable in winning positions. They looked to their club experiences, where many enjoyed extraordinary success.

That era is over, and, despite some success, the stereotype was carried through the decade.

The notion of the Irish as underdogs goes far deeper than sport. It’s part of our self-identity, and was adapted for the emigrant generations. The histories of the Irish in the US and Australia contain a characterisation of the Irish as the underdog.

Sport as a carrier for cliche isn’t exactly new either. Rugby, in particular, is translated into the language of stereotypes and caricature, some lazy (“maybe it’s the Italians’ Latin temperament”; “which French team will turn up?”), but there is a deeper well of stereotype that comes from somewhere darker.

English newspapers have always been ready to ascribe tribal attributes to the Celtic nations. The Irish have long been passionate, unpredictable, wild, scrappers not thinkers.

A study of ITV’s coverage of the 1995 Rugby World Cup (featured in Joseph Maguire’s and Jason Tuck’s essay in Power and Global Sport) ticks off a full list of cliches, which you could hear repeated this time out. They talked of “tremendous heart” and “rampaging madmen”. They studied the London Times’s rugby coverage since 1945, and found how the Irish were constantly written about as “marauding green devils” and the like.

This was the image the Irish rugby team sought to shed, that of frenzied but limited players who burned themselves out after 20 minutes. But at its core was an ancient notion of the Celtic fringe, the savages at the border. And perhaps the surprising thing about post-Celtic Tiger Ireland is that in international sport our leading teams can’t shake it. It’s too deep-rooted. It cannot be the answer for a poor performance, but it does lie deep in the self-analysis, nagging away. While in the public analysis, it is explicit.

Plus, it means identifying with the underdog, regardless of historical relationship. When Scotland played Argentina in the Rugby World Cup, I was in a bar full of Irish who had just enjoyed a win over Russia. In a tight match, Argentina’s breakthrough try was greeted with a lot of cheering from the Irish. This enraged a drunken Scottish supporter, who mumbled, “Why the f*** would the Irish not support the Scots? Scum.” He really wasn’t happy. But he had a point. What links do we have with Argentina? But Scotland? We share a language, a sea, a common heritage, genes, population, history, a grievance against the English, a couple of football clubs and, every year, a great rugby weekend.

Now the Irish soccer team get to be favourite against Estonia in the Euro 2012 play-off. Estonia, apparently, are delighted to get us. Actually, we have a lot in common. In Russian jokes, the Estonians are often the butt of the humour, treated as lazy and a bit dull, and mocked for their accent. We’ll need to set aside our own stereotype as bad favourites – or fall to those plucky Estonians with their warrior spirit.

Twitter: @shanehegarty