BRAVADO, POWER, gall, certainty, confidence. The Irish cricket team’s World Cup triumph in Bangalore tested the sporting vocabulary and brought deserved superlatives all over the world this week to celebrate a remarkable victory – over England!
It suddenly lifted the spirits at home, depressed by continuing economic gloom after the election. As Enda Kenny said “with self-belief the apparently impossible can be made possible and real change can occur”. Kevin O’Brien, who scored the fastest century ever in the competition, was well-described by one letter-writer to this newspaper as doing what every club cricketer has ever dreamt of doing. Another said that “having voted out the worst government in the history of the State, the sun is out, the sky is blue and now we are world beaters in cricket”. Any sporting enthusiast watching O’Brien’s innings and the care with which his colleagues completed that feat to win the match has much to learn from it. The team’s combination of spirit and skill has indeed done much to lift the national mood.
That mood has rarely drawn on cricket for inspiration, since it was indelibly labelled a foreign game by resurgent nationalism 100 years and more ago when the Gaelic Athletic Association was founded and developed. After the famine cricket was a hugely popular game in rural and urban Kilkenny and Tipperary and elsewhere, not at all the exclusive preserve of landlords or British army officers as it was later portrayed. O’Brien’s wonderful hand-eye co-ordination and wrist skills as a batsman should remind us that hurling displaced cricket in those and other counties.
Cricket in independent Ireland continued as a minority game with a dedicated following, in Dublin city and county, in many other places where grounds were preserved, and it remained stronger in Northern Ireland. It has been revived by a younger generation of ordinary Irish people responding to the game’s international buoyancy, exposure to the English county league and by immigrants from India, Pakistan and Australia who have filled out teams and brought new skills. This allows us understand better how cricket has become an affirmation of post-colonial identity, drawing on many cultural values shared by Ireland.
The Irish team’s steady progress reflects all these influences. But there is nothing freakish about victories like this or the one against Pakistan in 2007. They flow from a dedicated coaching effort, a capacity to work together with scarce resources and, above all, from a daredevil spirit among a really talented group of players. Their game against India tomorrow will have a commensurate audience who will hope efforts to streamline the World Cup do not have the effect of excluding such a good team from the competition.
If we are to draw national lessons from this achievement, that effort to bring on talent, use limited resources co-operatively and dare to face huge challenges courageously will go a long way to repair a national mood weighed down by so much gloom. The same thing happened during Italia ’90, after all.