Happy faces for once as sun shines on rugby country

The non-playing residents of rugby country know one thing for certain – Irish rugby isn’t joyful very often

DESPITE THOSE annoying advertisements that are plastered on billboards all over the island no one has ever really delineated the territory occupied by what is known as rugby country.

Rugby country, although larger than it used to be, is probably not as big as those advertisers suppose. Rugby country, where lineouts are straight and sentences are corkscrew. Heavy on the adjectives, light on the verbs. Big men on television talking for hours and hours and hours.

Rugby country, I live there.

Yesterday morning was unusual in rugby country as the sports pages were anticipated – for once – with pleasure. Ireland’s win against England on Saturday had bathed the entire landscape of rugby country in a warm glow. We like to think that this glow extended over the whole of Ireland, but we are too surprised to care about that very much.

Because a cloud of psychological pain normally lies over Irish rugby; some of us think this is due to the amount of frustrated homosexual love that swirls and eddies within the game, but that research is ongoing.

It is, however, safe to say that there is a melancholia about Irish rugby. David Walsh in the Sunday Timesput it like this: "For those who have grown up with Irish rugby, winter often seemed like an endless season speckled with very occasional sunshine." Sounds like the Seventies to me.

It is always difficult to describe with any accuracy the place where you have grown up and still live. But it is undeniable that rugby country is an extraordinarily emotional place, with a bizarre logic discernible in its atmosphere. "The early bird may get the worm but it's the second mouse that gets the cheese," according to Neil Francis in yesterday's Sunday Independent.It takes 15 minutes of thinking about, but actually that statement could be true. Here you have writing that was not only produced under time pressure – these boys have to file their copy right after the game – but writing that is buckling under the joy that it is carrying.

We, the non-playing residents of rugby country, realise that we do not know very much about rugby. We do try to decipher it, just as a non-Chinese speaker would try to get by in Beijing. And like a non-Chinese speaker in Beijing, we have some pretty basic observations from which we cannot be parted.

The first of these is that rugby isn’t joyful very often. To see the nation’s players smiling and laughing on the pitch on Saturday was shocking when we are so used to seeing these fit young men looking miserable, disgusted and disappointed.

To see them slapping each other on the back in an encouraging manner. To see them huddle together to talk. To see Brian O’Driscoll, as he lay on the ground smiling after scoring his try, having his face brushed by a caressing hand, these are strange sights in rugby country.

Irish wins aren’t usually like that. David Walsh rather brilliantly remembers past victories this way: “Those were once-in-a-decade February afternoons when doctors and farmers, dentists and businessmen pretended to be madmen and the foot-rush was an opportunity to strike fear into the opposition. For years that rare performance was the oxygen that kept Irish rugby breathing.”

The key phrase there is “pretended to be madmen”. Perhaps all madmen are just pretending to be madmen. But there seems a case to be made that Irish rugby in those days was played by men who would much rather have been having a gin in the clubhouse bar than rolling around in the mud hurting each other. No wonder they all took up golf as soon as they could. It’s as if rugby was a masculinity test for middle-class youths. Once you’d succeeded at it you could relax back into what passes for civilised behaviour.

Now rugby is a professional business and of course it’s still a competition in Irish masculinity, which sometimes takes on an international aspect.

"Rampant Ireland rip apart England" said the Sunday Times."Sexton hits top gear as the wheels fall off the chariot" says the Sunday Independent.Stephen Jones in the Sunday Timesknows exactly what Ireland's victory means (although he wasn't so friendly a couple of weeks ago): "This was a victory for the gnarled and composed over the fresh-faced, the undercooked and the youthful. Some of England's younger players fell apart, with the crowd-pleasing gestures and misplaced arrogance of the early season confined to history." He's talking about the men and the boys there, you see. And he's furious with England: "England's attacking play was a millimetre above a disgrace..."

Neil Francis says England “were lateral to the point of monotony”. I have no idea what that means but it sounds fantastic.

Rugby insults have always appeared alarmingly rich, like a mink coat in an orphanage. Here is Francis’s next sentence on England: “They played with a passion, verve and pizzazz of a meter reader XV.”

It sounds as if rugby country is a lush and tropical place, with these commentators swanning about it in opera coats, trailing clouds of opium.

Instead rugby country is a damp and uncomfortable mystery, which I will never understand. But it was nice to see everyone so very happy for once.