There is one reason, and one reason only, why Ireland cannot beat England at Twickenham: it is that rugby is not played to Olympic ice-skating rules. As the Winter Games from Salt Lake City - or any winter games over the past 30 years would equally have shown - victory is decided before the competition, by the judges.
And rightly. The real point of athletics is to fly the maximum number of administrators and judges in blazers and white Panamas around the world, first class, to stay in hotels in Rio, the Maldives and the Seychelles for conferences to discuss where they should go for the next Olympics conference.
True Olympic spirit
But the IOC never hosts its conferences in Lurgan, at Mabel Mawhinney's B & B, where she serves the genuine Ulster Fry complete with half a pound of liquid Frytex per plate, with coronary arteries fully lagged and ready to seize by nightfall. So IOC delegates never get to enjoy the cultural event of Drumcree, with maybe all their Catholic members ending up on top of a bonfire and burned alive. Such japes! Maybe Algeria next time? Nope. It has never happened, and you know, it never will.
The IOC is far too interested in the true Olympic spirit of lusciously golden beaches, five-star hotels, platinum bangles under your pillow when you arrive, lashing of Dom Perignon before the oysters, lobsters and foie gras with nightingales' tongues. And maybe a tasty cocktail waitress or two in your bed when you turn in, if you're a chap that is: female delegates get a special form alphabetically to fill in for their alphabetical preferences, which range from Elizabeth Arden to other things that go zzzzzzz.
The IOC revealed yet again how it understands the true nature of sport, at Salt Lake City, when the Russian figure skaters, Elena Berenzhhnaya and Anton Sikharuldze, were awarded gold medals. We are used to surprise judgments in all Olympic assessment sports - oh, you know, ballroom dancing, tapestry, ice-sculptures - but even by the refreshingly diseased standards of the IOC, this was exceptional.
For Anton was performing as if he was wearing a couple of blunt tin-openers rather than skates, and unable to stand. Instead he toured the ice like a boar seal looking for winsomely fat she-seals to deflower. And why not? It has been one of the many scandalous failings of the IOC Rigged Rules for Skating Judges that they've not allowed free-style skaters seal-slide around the rink. This is not true free-style, but simply old fashioned sealism, through and through. Worse than South Africa in the bad old days.
Classic Gallic flair
So it says something for the enormous strength of character of the French judge, Marie-Reine Le Gougne, that, with classic Gallic élan, verve, flair and éclat - all French words, you notice - she was able to ignore the traditional Sealist Rigged Rules for Skating Judges and vote for the Russian pair, as did of course all the former eastern-bloc countries: the Berlin Wall might have come down in 1989, but in IOC politics, it stands as proudly as ever it did.
Well, that wasn't the end of it, not least because the new, post-September 11th US said, "Now just hold there one itty bitty second, this here was supposed to be free-style ice-skating, not some goddamned free-style belly-sliding". And there was a bit of an investigation, after which the Canadians were awarded gold as well. In other words, this time the result was rigged not just before and during the contest, which is what normally happens, but afterwards as well.
And poor Madame le Gougne? Eh bien, she was sent packing, because she was, in the words of the French Skating Federation, "emotionally fragile". (These things seldom translate well.)
So why not resurrect the principles of the Gougne show in Twickenham? It's quite obvious that by the usual sporting standards of fastest-strongest-cleverest, an Irish rugby team is as likely to beat England there as a Saudi women's ice hockey team would be to win a gold by performance alone. But once you introduce the Gougnian principles of an Olympian fix before, during and after a match, there should be no problem about Ireland beating England; and time after time as well.
Because then it won't matter what happens on the pitch, any more than it matters what happens on the ice in the winter Olympics. England can cut through the Irish defence like killer whales, and the match might end with a score of 105-0 to England.
Father Jack
The Irish pack might have performed like a heap of Clonakilty white puddings, Mrs Doyle might have been playing at out-half, Father Jack at full-back, both Dublin archbishops in the centre, with the svelte, greyhound-like figure of Liam Lawlor on the wing.
Irrelevant! For at the end of the game we will turn to Mme Gougne and her fellow (and preferably Gallic) judges and, after gravely reminding them of the Hundred Years War, of Crécy and Agincourt, of the Heights of Abraham, of Waterloo and Oran, and after adding that the next rugby conference is to take place on an island in the Great Barrier Reef, famed for its seafood, the scuba diving amid the coral, the miles of beaches, we will ask them to consider carefully: who really won the rugby match between England and Ireland? By Olympian standards, we know the answer to that: the team which gets to the judges, first, last and most. Reach for the piggy bank, lads: it's time we started winning in Twickenham.