There was a ruck on the letters pages of The Irish Times at the end of last week. Or maybe it was a maul. On the eve of the Six Nations, Pat Burke Walsh from Wexford wrote that he was dreading the invasion of the “wax-jacketed seasonal rugger buggers” into the pubs.
He continued, in a tone of high dudgeon, that “most of them didn’t attend the elite schools where rugby is played by the pupils”. And furthermore: “They will have all the terminology but none of the knowledge.”
Unsurprisingly, there were some raised voices on the following day’s letters page. Victoria Madigan from Dublin 6 opened her letter by declaring her “umbrage” at Burke’s “generalisation” about Irish rugby fans, and Des Foley – getting in touch from Brittany in France – described the “stereotyping” of Irish rugby fans as “unfair.”
This bickering is not a new phenomenon. Since the advent of the now debased Heineken Cup coincided with a sharp upswing in the fortunes of the Ireland team, rugby has reached an audience that was outside its historical bailiwick. The age-old elements of elitism and exclusivity have not disappeared, but they reached an oil-and-water arrangement with the new crowd.
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To sustain itself in the professional era, rugby needed to broaden its appeal. It was a commercial imperative. In every sport, bandwagon-jumpers are regarded as opportunistic and flighty, and their behaviour is sniffed at by the long-suffering hard-core, but rugby needed heavily populated bandwagons in order to wash its face.
How far behind the leading pack are Ireland after defeat against France?
What it created was a subliminal stand-off between the blowhards and the blow-ins. Because rugby is the most complex field game in the world, the gulf between the experts and pints-in-hand bluffers is greater than in any other sport. The middle ground is occupied by various degrees of working ignorance, but in that milieu, a little knowledge is likely to go off like an unpinned grenade.
In the letters published on Thursday and Friday there were a few references to rugby’s “rules.” On the first page of the Bluffer’s Guide to Rugby, however, it is stated in bold letters that the rules of the game must be referred to as “laws”. All other bluffing emanates from this immutable first principle.
It’s like that Miles Kington line that Brian O’Driscoll kidnapped and tortured for an Ireland press conference 17 years ago. “Knowledge is knowing that a tomato is a fruit,” he said. “Wisdom is knowing not to put it in a fruit salad.”
Rules, laws; tomato, tomatoe.
The beauty of rugby, though, is that ignorance need not carry a stigma, unless you insist on denying it. Ignorance in rugby is the great equaliser. When a scrum goes down, for example, most of the time your guess about what happened is as good as the ref’s. Cheating in the scrum is one of the game’s most resilient vices. Along the way, everybody is stung.
In that context, rugby has been conscious for a long time of the need to explain itself, not just to innocent newcomers but to the perpetually bewildered who have been confused by the game all their lives. When the game expanded to include the bandwagon-jumpers of the professional era, this self-awareness was crucial.
It is more than 20 years since they started selling Ref Link earpieces outside rugby internationals, and in the live TV coverage now, there is an abundance of transparency. Refs are miked up not just to the Television Match Official but to the host broadcaster, which means that every contentious decision is explained. You don’t need to know all the laws or their nuances; you just need to listen.
Bandwagons have a relatively short life expectancy. Like a teenage crush, the feeling goes. What rugby needed, though, was a significant proportion of the bandwagon-jumpers to put down roots in the game and make a commitment, come what may.
Trying to put a number on that is impossible. In the early years of the Heineken Cup, for example, Munster had by far the biggest numbers of bandwagon-jumpers, and during Munster’s great decade in the competition, thousands of them became fervent Munster supporters.
But there is no bandwagon now. Munster can’t fill Thomond Park for any of their Heineken Cup games. As Munster fell further and further off the pace in Europe, they became far less attractive to the come-day-go-day brigade. There is no question, however, that thousands upon thousands of Munster’s established following now were bandwagon jumpers back in the day.
It will be interesting to see how support for the Ireland team holds up through this period of turbulence. It was a concussive few days, with the senior team, A team and under-20s all put through the wringer. The cumulative score in those three hammerings was 138-49. It is hard to remember a more wounding weekend in the modern history of Irish rugby.
Attendances at the November internationals have oscillated over the years, and the Aviva has not always been full, not even for games against tier-one nations. The Six Nations is a different beast. A certain proportion of tickets that are distributed through the clubs will end up in the hands of the corporate sector and the performance of the team is not necessarily going to spoil their pampered day out or their desire to be invited again.
In the clubs, people go out of habit and loyalty, even if the IRFU’s extortionate pricing must be testing the means of many die-hards.
The really interesting metric will be the TV audiences because this is where Irish rugby made the greatest gains in the bandwagon era. People who had no previous attachment to the game were seduced by the success and the excitement.
In 2016, for example, Ireland’s Six Nations game against France attracted an audience of 672,000. Last year, the same fixture drew an average audience of 920,000 but peaked at 1.4 million. The peak figure for Ireland’s hammering last Thursday night, though, was 1.1 million, a drop of 17 per cent.
The most likely explanation for the fall in numbers was the well-founded pessimism about Ireland’s chances. And in the coming weeks, it will be interesting to see how that graph progresses.
But at the turn of the century, the audience for Irish rugby was nothing like that. Whatever you may feel about bandwagons, it was the best thing that ever happened Irish rugby.
