A team that should conquer the divide

Sideline Cut: This is the aggravating thing about the game of rugby and Dublin city. On the eve of what will be, win or lose, a glorious occasion for Irish sport this city does not feel engaged.,writes Keith Duggan.

Oh, walk around the cobbled theme streets in the city centre and you will catch the atmosphere but there is not the same unifying sense that Irish World Cup adventures and even the Gaelic Dubs, who were bigger than Jesus for a while there, managed to create.

The obvious reason for this is, of course, the traditional north-south divide across which the oval ball shall not pass. Dubliners, it seems to this boondocker, regard the Liffey not so much a ruined if potentially beautiful river as the equivalent of the Berlin Wall across which there can be no imaginative leaps. Living on the northside, all the talk has been of this weekend's visit to Georgia by the beloved boys in green, a trip that has had a cursed feel to it. I was intrigued, though not necessarily encouraged, to learn that Brian Kerr has taken to playing the revered and doomed band The Blades in the dressing room before games. Was Paul Cleary from the northside? Probably.

You don't have to be Bernard Morris to figure out that in Dublin, like a lot of cities, rugby is the preferred sport of the privileged and breeds polished youngsters with a grand sense of entitlement and soccer is played by their streetwise contemporaries from across the murky stream, kids at whom the advertisers behind Fish Fingers aim their product.

Of course, that is a gross generalisation but it is also the common perception. Until I came to live in this city, I thought the north-south divide concerned the national 'sit-e-a-shun' so often referred to by Gerry Adams and David Irvine. But the godfathers of those families will have presided over inter-marriages by the time the chasm that divides this city is bridged.

Maybe there have been generations of smugness and seclusion on the part of those that reside in the primarily affluent pockets where rugby thrives and maybe the I.R.F.U has been wrongly involved in promoting that narrow mindedness or snobbery. But equally, there seems to reside a perverse pride in almost denying the existence of the game in broad areas across the northside. Disinterest or indifference would be wholly understandable but it is often beyond that; it is something deeper, a grimmer resolve to have no truck with the game.

Of course there are undoubtedly folk from the northside that live for Irish rugby and probably loads from the southside who have Blades albums and dig Brian Kerr. But they are in the minority. And the thing about the mutual prejudices that the northside and southside communities reserve for one another is that they are tedious as hell.

The Irish team who will take the field at Lansdowne Road tomorrow form as thorough a representation of what this country is about as any team in the nation's past. Yes, there are past pupils of the gilded colleges whose sporting achievements get prime time in this and other newspapers. And there is a farmer from Clare. There are Ulster Protestants and English-reared players and pure Cork boyos. There is Brian O'Driscoll who, more often than not, plays like he doesn't even come from earth, let alone Ireland. There is a dude with a Sydney accent. The common denominator is that they are all, as luck would have it, exceedingly pleasant individuals, equipped with the certainty required of all top athletes, yes, but incredibly unassuming and approachable. In short, they are a team worth celebrating no matter what.

Where I am from, rugby was and is played in a clandestine way. People who set off looking for the local pitch to catch a Saturday game often had to be saved by the Search and Rescue. But it was and remains a good scene, honest and unpretentious, played purely for the sake of enjoyment of the game, an outpost well beyond the telescope of the I.R.F.U. Like all small sports in rural Ireland, it survives because of the stubborn nature of a few. The local interest in the game remains small but general sporting interest in a big Irish game has always been strong. Stories you hear about local, provincial rugby are often funny and self-deprecating and brutal. In soul and fact, they are often the polar opposite to the charges of elitism so often and understandably levelled at the city game. In the large sections of the country where rugby struggles for breath, it seems to be more a blue- than a white-collar game. If the prevailing attitude towards the Connacht game is anything to go by, those frontiersmen will toil without help for the considerable future. It is hard to see links being extended from D.4. All the outsiders share with the official network is the chief source of inspiration.

You grew up being wowed by Ollie Campbell and then by Keith Crossan and then by Simon Geoghegan and Clohessy without ever caring much about where they were from or were schooled. And later you would meet others from west of Ireland towns with limited, if any, rugby ambitions who loved the Five Nations tournament.

Last Saturday was one of those rare, unexpected moments that give you the shivers. I have searched hard for a moment in Irish sport that thrilled so completely and without provocation as Ronan O'Gara's drop-goal. The extent of its greatness is, of course, open to eternal argument. But given the arena, the circumstances, the drama that had preceded it and the fact that it was virtually his first touch in the whole Six Nations season makes it in my view really hard to surpass. The moment possessed everything one requires of sport at its most heightened and I hope that when this season is over, it is handsomely revisited and given its due accolade.

What it has left us with, of course, is tomorrow's epic, an affair that shouldn't so much be televised as filmed in widescreen by Peter Jackson. For it is a clash with a Tolkienesque element of age and mysticism. Ireland versus England. Where to begin? All logic points to a crushing by England but this is a country that delights in subverting logic. So the prospect is all the more delicious.

I know that there will be rural areas of Ireland ostensibly untouched by rugby's powerful hand in absolute meltdown tomorrow. So it should be. Ireland is a small country and sport's operatic melodramas can only visit us once every generation. Out of the blue comes a lone cyclist, a runner, a great soccer player that inspires and divides and forces us to question in the way our political leaders have long since stopped doing. Now comes this Ireland rugby team, blessed with daring and ambition, a sliver of genius and a bit of charm.

At two o'clock tomorrow, they really ought to completely still this city. They deserve that attention. But now, on the eve, it is hard to feel all of the suburbs trembling as they might. Maybe I am wrong. But by now, you ought to be able to smell the fever in the air.

Perhaps it will take the unbelievable at Lansdowne Road to draw all of Dublin in.

Maybe after that, the first of the ancient bricks that are as high as the Liffey water is deep will begin to tumble.