Last month, when Ireland were about to play Argentina at the Rugby World Cup, the former French international Thomas Castaignède wrote in the Guardiannewspaper that he was praying for "a great surge of Irish pride". (An Irish victory would have suited the French.) But then he reflected in sadness and bewilderment that, on the basis of Ireland's other performances, this seemed unlikely: "I can't get over how soulless Ireland seemed," writes Fintan O'Toole.
Castaignède's mot juste - soulless - captures something that seems common both to our national rugby and soccer teams and to the broader state of the nation. If it strikes outside observers that Irish teams don't have the qualities that once made them formidable, is it too much to suggest that we, too, can see the pitiful exits from the World Cup and Euro 2008 as cyphers of a deeper malaise?
As a general rule, using sport as a metaphor for life is a mug's game. It generates cliches with the virulence of a fast-breeder reactor. (Being a team player on the level-playing field of journalism, I don't want to pull any punches here or take my eye off the ball.)
Useless national stereotypes (temperamental Latins, disorganised Africans, inscrutable Chinese, ice-cool Scandinavians, cheating foreigners) are often the prisms through which we see sport as an expression of collective identity, and Irish pride and soul can be part of the same tawdry package. The point of sport, in any case, is that it isn't real life.
There are, nevertheless, two areas in which the performances of our national teams can be reasonably linked to the broader direction of our society: management and expectation.
Some times and places are very good at producing exceptionally gifted leaders. (Three of the greatest football managers of the 20th century, Bill Shankly, Jock Stein and Matt Busby, all came from the same mining village communities south of Glasgow.) Some are not.
Does it say something about our culture now that it churns out dull organisation men who couldn't inspire a cow to chew grass? Isn't there some kind of connection between the IRFU's decision to give its coach a lucrative new contract before the World Cup that is to test his mettle, and the political culture in which nobody in power has to answer for anything?
The connection, surely, is the smugness that is spawned in a stagnant pool of easy money. We have lost the capacity to connect rewards to results. When the money keeps rolling in for the IRFU and the FAI, nobody has to answer for failure, unless their demise is necessary to protect someone with more power from having to answer for failure. If this sounds familiar, it is because it could be a precise description of government in the last decade, when unprecedented opportunities have been matched by unprecedented unaccountability.
(Micheál Martin made it official by telling us that he was not responsible for what happened in his department.)
Expectation, meanwhile, shapes, not so much what happens on the pitch, as what it means. The Rugby World Cup was a triumph for Georgia because they won one game and performed respectably in the others. San Marino were thrilled when we beat them 2-1, but we were mortified. Conversely, the best fun most Irish sports fans have had this year has been the Cricket World Cup, where Ireland got routinely thumped, but pulled off a surprise victory over Pakistan. Not losing every game was a feat that transported us back to the best days of Irish soccer, in 1988 and 1990, when we were deliriously happy to be at major finals and demented with joy at not disgracing ourselves.
But when expectations rise, we get altitude sickness.
This, too, is a reflection of the wider shift in Irish society. For a long time, our culture was shaped by fatalism, an attitude whose pleasures are often underrated. Fatalism creates a sense of passivity, a tolerance for failure, but it's also a lot of fun since, when you expect nothing but the worst, small mercies seem joyously miraculous.
The pleasant changes of the last 15 years have banished fatalism, but we haven't replaced it with a genuine sense of expectation. We're not comfortable with the notion that we're a First- World wealthy economy with a right to expect first-world healthcare, education, planning and political systems. When we use words like "world-class", it's hubris and bluster, not a serious, concrete aspiration.
So we're promised a "world-class" football manager and get the reserve coach from mighty Walsall. We talk ourselves up as serious contenders to be world champions in rugby and get played off the park by Georgia. We've lost the old feckless, divil-may-care, give-it-a-lash attitude that was rooted in fatalism and that was, I suppose, what constituted our "soul".
This would be fine if we'd replaced it with a serious-minded, methodical notion of goals being set, demands being made and consequences flowing from choices.
What we've got instead though is smugness, a sense of entitlement, the delusion that we have it made - not attitudes that win you much, on or off the field.