International sport is far more complex than simply ‘Us v Them’

It’s possible to hold two thoughts in your head at the same time. It’s possible to hold a thousand of them, says you, as the nights tick by in this endless stasis and sleeping patterns become a lucky dip. The days when we looked on the bright side and imagined the pandemic as a nice pause point, some breathing space in which to gain perspective on things, those days have long since passed. Everything is a face-off now. Trenches dug, battle lines drawn.

But life isn’t really like that. It’s not how people generally live. The vast majority of people have certain thoughts about certain things but in the normal run of their daily affairs, they don’t live or die by them. They understand that there are shades of grey in pretty much everything.

It is possible, for example, to admire CJ Stander’s time in an Ireland shirt and still think it’s wrong that he was able to have an Ireland career. Nobody watching him on Saturday could argue for a second that his time in this country has been anything other than meaningful, or that his contribution has been anything less than full-blooded. If there must be a system by which professional rugby players can shop around their talents in the international game, Stander’s career is the model of that system’s very best outcome.

But we can still feel uncomfortable with it. We can still know in our bones that the whole point of international sport is that it’s supposed to be the best of ours against the best of theirs. We can love CJ Stander and Bundee Aki and still think that rugby was wrong to create that glitch in the system whereby all it took was three years of living here to change who they were.

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Nationalism

We can do all this, too, without lapsing into misty-eyed nationalism. We can think that the project player thing is a crock without it turning into ‘Keep Ireland For The Irish’. That’s not what this is at all.

It’s just that, on the whole, international sport is a thing that works. Every country buys into it in some shape or form because, rightly or wrongly, it is one of the faces a country presents to the world. When you chip away at that, you diminish it. You can be moved to tears by Stander’s interview with Sinéad Kissane on Saturday night and still believe that to be true.

Just as you can delight in a week’s racing at Cheltenham and still wish people would cool it with the crowing about how many Irish winners there were. You can be over the moon for Rachael Blackmore and Henry de Bromhead and Jack Kennedy and still be relieved that the one good thing about having no crowds there is that we were spared the sight of tricolours being thrown at the jockeys after every victory.

It is possible to celebrate the work done in Irish yards and still think the ‘Us v Them’ thing is just about the least interesting aspect of the whole week. You can see it as a thing to be proud of that rural Ireland is filled with the sort of expertise, ingenuity and hard work that leads to a week of such results and still point out that in a lot of cases the most crucial aspect of it all – the money to buy the best horses – comes from abroad.

Honeysuckle is a fantastic story for Blackmore and De Bromhead. It is also a fantastic story for Kenny Alexander, the Scottish ex-CEO of GVC Holdings, the massive gaming and betting company. He owns Telmesomethinggirl as well and the two Blackmore-ridden victories secured him second spot in the leading owners’ table for the week.

He was beaten only by Cheveley Park Stud, all of whose three winners were ridden by Blackmore. Allaho, Sir Gerhard and Quilixios made it a dream week for the Newmarket operation, who are still in their early days of dipping into the National Hunt scene. They’re a massive force on the flat in England but they’ve chosen to spend their jumps money in Ireland.

Of the top six owners in the Cheltenham table last Friday night, Michael O’Leary’s Gigginstown House Stud is the only one based in Ireland. Joe Donnelly and JP McManus are Irish owners living abroad. Monkfish was Rich Ricci’s sole winner of a frustrating week - the American ex-banker has been a huge supporter of the game in Ireland, all of it from his London base.

Irish dominance

Looked at from that light, all the crowing about all these Irish wins can start to feel a little hollow after a while. If you cocked an ear over the weekend you heard a thousand different theories for the overwhelming Irish dominance of Cheltenham and all of them have merit of one sort or another. But at brass tacks level, the best horses are generally the most expensive ones.

It is possible to think it’s a great thing that UK owners spending avalanches of money on horses want to send them to Irish trainers and also to wonder why they might do that. Can all that fabled rural expertise suddenly be so much more advanced than it is in the English shires?

Or does it have as much to do with the fact that the sport in Ireland is enormously taxpayer-funded? What is it about the €67m of Government money that goes into Irish racing each year that these owners find so attractive? It is possible to enjoy a good week for Irish racing and still need convincing on the precise nature of our investment.

Everything has its different shades. Every argument can be met with a ‘yeah, but’ response. But we live in a world of trenchant obduracy, where no small patch of ground can be conceded on anything. This is especially true of life online, where nuance goes to be lined up against a wall and shot.

No issue is simple. If it was, it wouldn’t be an issue in the first place.