Later, as Thursday night turns into Friday morning, the first ball of the 2025-26 Ashes will be bowled, and Australia will come face-to-face with the almost unthinkable. The Poms might actually be favourites to beat them, in a home series.
We spoke to Daniel Norcross of the BBC on the Second Captains podcast this week, a commentator of long standing on Test Match Special, one of the most iconic radio shows in the world. What he said to us about the national identities we are given, or try to give ourselves, rings true this week more than most others, for obvious reasons.
Australia should be full of new frontier optimism, England should be the crusty old guardians of the game. They invented it, after all. But in cricket, Australia are the dyed-in-the-wool traditionalists, distrustful of change and, in fact, contemptuous of England’s upbeat, underdog positivity.
The Aussie cricket culture is about old-school toughness and grit. Sledging is almost as prized a skill as bowling, batting or fielding, although they prefer the term “mental disintegration”. It’s not enough for them to win; others must lose, crumble, wilt.
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Rassie Erasmus doesn’t even need the comforts of home to engage in this sort of thing in order to lean into the national identity he is safeguarding as South Africa’s coach. At some stage this week, he will try to ratchet up the pressure on the Ireland team he faces in Lansdowne Road on Saturday. But he might finally be overmatched, because he faces a nation that frankly couldn’t care less about the Springboks this week.
I’m sure by the weekend we’ll have come round a small bit, but by then it’ll be too late for Rassie’s usual pre-game preamble to have had any impact whatsoever. I asked my most fervent rugby friend on Tuesday afternoon if he’d prefer a North Macedonia draw against Wales, or an Ireland win on Saturday.
Bear in mind that a North Macedonia draw would only have been one of the two results we needed to secure a home playoff semi-final, which in itself is only one of two games we’d have to win to get to the World Cup. His answer? “Oh, that’s not even a choice, of course it’s North Macedonia.”
The identity of the Republic of Ireland team for almost 30 years, from Euro ’88 to Euro 2016, was one where we could often be outmatched, but never outfought. That was never entirely true, but it was how we felt about ourselves – and that was enough to see us qualify for three European Championships and three World Cups. But the 5-1 playoff defeat to Denmark in November 2017 seemed to break something fundamental in us. A fatalism set in. And it took Troy Parrott to put us back together again.
What we’ve witnessed since Sunday has been a spontaneous, and then sustained, outpouring of joy. Even the North Macedonians getting walloped couldn’t bring us down. As that was happening on Tuesday night, many of us switched our attention to the Scotland/Denmark game and we were able to relive the joy we’d felt 50 or so hours before. They got two goals in injury-time to win 4-2, and skipped the playoffs altogether. They’re going to the World Cup.
Two of our prospective opponents from Pot 2 were in action this week. The Czech Republic beat Gibraltar 6-0, Slovakia lost to Germany 6-0. International football is uneven, but it is beautiful, because nothing else in football hits quite like it.
In the GAA, we are acutely aware of what it’s like to represent something bigger than the dressingroom of people you train with. It’s what makes the whole jamboree go round. Sometimes the privacy of that joy is what makes it special. This year, for instance, watching Madden or Loughmacrory winning their first county finals, you couldn’t help but feel jealous.
Most GAA clubs have had those days. But the joy we’ve felt since Sunday afternoon in Budapest is compounding – you have your own joy, but you take the joy you see in other people and it adds to your own. It multiplies and ends up going around the globe, as we’ve seen. It’s Madden or Loughmacrory, but it’s writ large, across the entire country.
The most thrilling wins somehow manage to reaffirm national identity while also subtly subverting it. Winning a game 3-2 is not usually how we do things, home or away. Parrott’s hat-trick was our first ever away from home in a competitive game. But the spirit that threw Liam Scales into the air, the inner determination that launched Parrott’s foot at that knock-down, we could all recognise that.
Whatever Australian cricketers or South African rugby players believe about themselves is a mixture of tradition and wilful delusion. If you believe it, you might just become it. Winning then casts that sense of self in stone. That’s how dynasties are built, in Nowlan Park or Eden Park or the Maracana.
A sense of identity based purely on where you’re from can be a complicated thing. Dangerous too, of course. But, as the cartoonist Harry Burton captured so beautifully, this week was a chance to take those tricolours down off lamp-posts, and wrap them around your neighbour. Powerful.
