Barnes just the ticket for blue brigade

TV VIEW:"HIS CELEBRATION is premature," bellowed Miles Harrison, but it wasn't entirely clear if he was referring to Wesley Fofana out on the pitch or Stuart Barnes beside him.

Either way, those moments waiting for the TV referee to find his remote control for his Video Arbitrage must surely go down as among the most unpleasantly gut-churning in the history of Irish sport.

Mind you, the Clermont Auvergne faithful won’t forget them for a while either. By the time us telly-watchers had it confirmed that the try wasn’t a try at all, they were still hugging and dancing and wooting and hollering and booking their flights to London on their iPhones.

You had to feel sorry for them. No? Not even a tiny bit? Harsh.

The camera picked out a woman bedecked in Clermont colours who had been sporting the face of someone whose Euro lottery numbers had come up, only then to be informed that her dog had eaten the ticket.

And then there was the Leinster fan who thought his dog had eaten his winning ticket, but found it stuck to the fridge door with a Rob Kearney magnet. The ticket, not the dog.

It’s what you call ‘a rather dramatic turnaround in fortunes’.

And no one was more banjaxed from it all than Miles, who’d already nigh on lost his voice in Dublin commentating on the Ulster game. Stuart had too. Edinburgh, he told us, had Ulster “discombobulated,” and we kept looking at the scoreline and wondering if being discombobulated in rugby was actually a good thing.

But back to yesterday where Fofana appeared to have discombobulated Leinster. Miles certainly suspected as much, half indicating that he thought it was a game-clinching try.

“ClermoooooOOOOOOooooooont AuveeeeeeeeEEEEEEEeeeeeergne! The yeeeeeears of agony at home have come to an end! The European angst as welllllllllllll!”

Stuart was no less convinced, dipping his quill in to his ink to pen the obituary for Leinster’s 2012 Heineken hopes. “Fofana has got that ball down! His running line was supreeeeeeeeme,” he bawled.

But? Wait. Ho, ho. Another angle. A quite delicious one, too.

Stuart: “Fofana has got that ball down! …… no he hasn’t!”

Miles: “I don’t think he has!”

Stuart: “He has not!”

Miles: (Peculiar shrieking sound).

Stuart: (A gasp that measured 12.8 on the Richter Scale).

Miles: (Struggling for breath)

Stuart: “The ball’s popped up in the air and he lost it!”

All you could say, really, was ‘bless Fofana’s bulging bicep’ which interfered in his attempt to send Leinster packing. They should dedicate a statue to it and place it outside the new Lansdowne.

Assumptions about Leinster’s demise had then, it seemed, been greatly exaggerated. At 78:52 in the game, Sunday, April 29th, in the year of our Lord (or whatever your higher power preference) 2012, referee Wayne Barnes did that sweepy ‘no, no, no’ gesture, the relief of Fergus McFadden beside him a sight to behold.

It was, it has to be said, all a bit spine-tingly. Even for those of us who only watch rugby between proper football matches.

Not that it ended there. We had three minutes more to go. Three minutes that seemed to feature nothing on our screens but Clermont rear-ends as they tried to push the little ball over the line. Scrummin’ and ruckin’ and maulin’, and the like.

Leinster had the look of the Maginot Line, although while the Maginot Line had its flaws, Leinster’s defence appeared to have none. At all.

Final. Whistle.

Miles: “It’s one game away now from European Cup immortality! To be the greatest of them all! That’s what Leinster can achieve!”

Miles, no more than ourselves, had discovered that if a week is a lengthy time in politics, three minutes in rugby is just a bit interminable.

Stuart had chucked his quill in the bin and was declaring this to be Leinster’s finest hour, their “greatest semi-final victory, and that includes the one at Croke Park against Munster”.

“Is there anything that this team does not have,” asked Miles. “They’re 80 minutes away from Heineken immortality,” Stuart replied, maintaining the theme.

By now, you’d have to assume, any watching Munster fans were probably saying ‘ah lads’, or something along those lines.

A slam dunk for Leinster in the end, though.

“This isn’t meant to sound racist, but I feel genuinely sorry for anyone who isn’t from Leinster,” Ross O’Carroll-Kelly tweeted yesterday.

And with that Munster and Connacht ordered their Ulster shirts for May 19th.

It’ll be a discombobulating day.