As with most of my sporting awakenings, tv coverage of the 1991 Rugby World Cup got me playing the oval ball game. It was mainly to do with the fact that Ireland, with Ralph Keyes and Jim Staples, reached the quarter finals, only losing narrowly to the Australia of Michael Lynagh and David Campese at Lansdowne Road in Dublin but it was the small scrum-halves like Nick Farr-Jones and Rob Saunders that made me think "I could do that". That day, it was Northern Irishman, Gordon Hamilton who scored the try that put Ireland ahead when he ran onto an inside pass from Jack Clarke and improbably scampered away from the lightning quick Campese then fought off a last ditch tackle from the winger coming across from the far side to go over in the corner. Landsdowne Road erupted. Fans spilled onto the pitch. Ireland were seven minutes away from defeating the mighty Aussies to set up a semi final with the All Blacks. Moments later the old stadium was silenced when Lynagh brilliantly picked up Campese's messy lay back to win the game for Australia. I later discovered my cousin was at the game when I saw an article he wrote about it for the school magazine. I read it over and over, half jealous he was there and half enthralled by his experience. The local rugby club harnessed the good feeling around Irelands performance by taking out an ad in the paper looking young players to join. I was keen and I roped in a couple of the boys from my street to go too. I'd grown up playing soccer in the winter and gaelic football in the summer. Liverpool weren't doing so well and I wasn't getting picked for my football team so had fallen out of love with it. Rugby was never on anyones radar. It was viewed as a protestant sport played at protestant schools. Later it became clear it was a middle class sport played by the elite schools north and south. The World Cup and the newspaper ad had done the trick as about 100 kids turned up to see what it was all about. Rugby was a game that seemed to have positions for boys of all shapes and sizes. Some were clearly sent by their parents to lose weight others who hadn't enough talent at soccer or gaelic football finally found a game they excelled at. I was just there because this was the latest thing I was totally into. A couple of training sessions later we were part of the clubs first ever youth teams and I was U14 captain. There were some disparaging comments made at school by teachers and fellow pupils about us playing rugby but none of us were selected for the school teams so we had no competing interests, we were just the weirdos who played a foreign game though it was a far lesser evil than soccer. Rugby was a lot more difficult than the best players in the world made it look on tv. I'd play either on the wing or my favourite position behind the scrum, if the first choice no.9 wasn't there or the out half was missing. Scrum-half was great because I was constantly involved in the action and I soon was able to spin the ball out to whoever was playing no.10 or create moves with the no.8 at the back of the scrum. If everyone was available then I played on the wing which I hated because I rarely saw the ball. It required 4 consecutive passes to get out to me and most of the time it only got as far as first centre before it broke down. The odd occasion it did get out to me, I didn't have any pace to beat my man so I had to just kick it down the line and chase after it. This happened maybe once per game which meant for about 55 mins I was stood out on the touchline in the freezing cold. There were some good moments. I got to travel all round the country playing matches against teams in places I'd never heard of. One of my proudest moments was when I got steamrolled by an opponent who was about 3 times the size of me. Playing on the wing, I was the last line of defence as this huge second row smashed through our forwards. As I watched him thunder towards the 6 stone me, every ounce of my being was screaming get out of the way but I would be subjected to an unmerciful slagging from my team mates if I'd done that. I'd seen others walk out of the way of a tackle and I just felt embarrassed for them, so I kissed my arse good-bye, braced myself, closed my eyes and tried to take him round the knees as we'd been trained to do. He ran right over the top of me and scored. After the game our manager singled me out for praise, presumably for not chickening out. There were some funny moments. We were beating one team out of sight and I had never managed to score so asked if I could take one of the conversions. I placed the ball, walked back, looked at the posts, looked at the ball, didn't like where it was sitting, wanted to re-place the ball so walked towards it, the opposition came charging out to block, I put my hand up like you might do in football to denote "I'm not taking this yet" and they stopped but you can't or couldn't do this in rugby and the referee declared the conversion missed and moved everyone to middle of the pitch to kick off. Our coaches thought it was hilarious that they all stopped when I put my hand up. I was just raging that I'd missed a great opportunity to finally score. I played rugby for 4 years and never scored a single point. I set a few up though. We were all novices at this game, thrown together as a team of strangers from different schools in all the surrounding areas. School yard rules applied. Decisions about team mates were made on what they looked like. In one game when we lined up for a scrum, one of our second rows had developed some suspicions about the sexuality of one of our props and probably his own too. As we set for the scrum, I could hear this screaming from the second row, the scrum moved forward to engage with the other team, this second row was trying to retreat out but was boxed in by a wing forward, the other second row and the no.8. He told me after that all he could see in the scrum was the rotating head of this prop freakily smiling back at him like something out of The Exorcist. He demanded to switch to no.8 for the rest of the game. Kids eh. When I got to U18 level, our manager sent out a club post card each week informing us we'd been selected for the upcoming game that weekend. It felt like an international call up. My best time from playing rugby was getting to a final of an all day tournament with that U18 team. Each game only lasted 20 mins and one score could win it. Our out-half was on fire, knocking over drop goals from everywhere. Our luck ran out in the final but no one expected us to get that far. I still reference the camaraderie between us that day as an example of what makes a successful team. Imagine if we'd won!
One of the perks of playing for a rugby club was that tickets were available for what was then the Five Nations Championship before Italy were included in 2000. I was 16 by the time the 1993 Championships were held and a few of us were able to get student priced tickets (£3!) for the final game of the season against the old enemy, England, at Lansdowne Road. We got the train down to Dublin and joined our fellow countrymen from north, south, east and west in one cause - to beat the English. These were the days before Irelands Call, were Amhran Na Bhfiann was the only anthem played, before the provinces of Ulster, Munster, Leinster and Connaught were swallowed up by club rugby. Cork Constitution, Greystones, London Irish and Ballymena were proudly represented back then. Simon Geoghegan, Nick Popplewell and Brian Robinson were all that remained from the Australia game in 1991 while more than half the England team that had also lost to Australia in the World Cup Final the same year, were still playing. Ireland hadn't beaten England since 1987. They were also heading for their third championship in a row. Michael Bradley and Eric Elwood were now the half backs. Elwood kicked 4 penalties as Ireland hit England with the kitchen sink. Their performance was probably best summed up by Mick Galweys game sealing try. 12-3 down, England had the ball and were passing it across their ten yard line. Will Carling received it from Stuart Barnes but Philip Danaher tackled the England captain as he tried to offload it. The ball went loose. Geoghegan, Cunningham and Clarke kept it alive. Suddenly Ireland had a ruck inside the 22. Bradley picked it up, Galwey looked like he was going to pick Bradley up and go for the line, Bradley was tackled just after he fed Galwey and the flanker charged forward with Tony Underwood hanging off him to touch down for the try in almost the exact same spot as Gordon Hamilton, 18 months earlier. Lansdowne Road exploded with noise and celebration. Fans were on the pitch, one of them was Galweys sister who'd flown in from New York for the game. She can be seen running after him on the pitch holding her handbag. We were behind the posts, stood at the opposite end of the ground but the whole stadium was bouncing as Ireland led 17-3. They weren't going to lose this one.
In March 1993, the Troubles were reaching their bloody climax but some of the worst atrocities would happen that year as the governments and politicians of Northern Ireland, Ireland and England tried to find a peaceful solution. 1993 would still be one of the worst years in the history of sectarian violence. There was tension ahead of this game too. About the time thousands of Ireland fans were getting off trains at Connolly Station in Dublin, an IRA bomb was detonated in Warrington town centre in north west England. Two children, 3 year old Jonathan Ball and 12 year old Tim Parry, were killed by the bomb and 54 others, just out shopping on a Saturday morning, suffered all kinds of horrendous injuries. There was worldwide condemnation. 5 days later, thousands held a peace rally in Dublin. They signed a book of condolence outside the GPO and laid wreaths and bouquets with messages of sympathy to be taken to Warrington for the boys funerals. We may or may not have been aware of a bomb exploding somewhere in England before we went into Lansdowne Road for the game. Not to be flippant, we'd grown up with so much bombing and killing that if it didn't land at your own front door then it hardly registered amongst us but we weren't totally oblivious to it either. 20 years later I was on a train station platform in Manchester looking for a bin to put my rubbish in. I was incredulous that in these supposed environmentally friendly times there were no waste management facilities. I asked a Conductor - "Can't have bins because of your lot" he informed me referring to the fact that in the past bins often housed bombs.
There was standing room only on the train back up north but as we got closer to the border, the post game jubilation diluted, we ceased to be Ireland rugby fans celebrating victory over the old enemy and we became catholics and protestants aware that the atrocities in England that day would have far reaching consequences for the citizens of Northern Ireland as no doubt plans for retaliation were being drawn up somewhere in Ulster that night. 5 more people were shot dead the following week. It was only about a half an hour dander home from the train station but when we got off the train my mum and dad were there to pick me up which confirmed to me that the rumours about the devastation in Warrington were true. My parents wanted to make sure I returned home safe, no doubt anyone with children of their own understood the losses suffered across the water that day more than care free teenagers like me.
I played rugby for another year or two but eventually found it all a bit Children Of The Damned. Coming from a soccer background, I found the respect for referees and the strange victorian accented boys asking for "scrum please ref", a bit alien. The popularity of Rugby continued to grow and even my dad who had very little interest in sport told me something he'd heard on the radio about the difference between it and soccer - one was a gentlemans game played by thugs the other was a thugs game played by gentlemen. I was sent off in my final game for talking back to a ref and with that also went my interest in the game. Rugby began to change when I started playing. A converted try went from 6 to 7 points, wingers went from seemingly little guys like Keith Crossan to 100m sprinters like Jonah Lomu as the game moved into the professional realm. I remember watching Soccer AM one Saturday morning and being astounded by how much bigger Matt Dawson was than the two Premier League footballers he was sat beside on the sofa. Similar to gaelic football, at 18, I would have been moving into the mens game and I wasn't built for the physicality of it. I was at charity gaelic football match a few years ago with my father in law. It was played at Ravenhill now known as the Kingspan Stadium, home of Ulster Rugby. I was reading the program and the foreward was by a former schoolmate and All Ireland winning GAA footballer who went on to work with Joe Schmidts Ireland. He said he wished he'd had the opportunity to play rugby at school because he believed it would have made him an even better footballer. Definitely, opinions have changed in Ireland around rugby. Stag do's went to Limerick so they could take in a Munster game at Thomond Park when they were at the height of their powers. There are probably more mixed marriages than ever so gaelic football and rugby are more accessible to mothers, fathers and grandparents from different religious backgrounds. Our Ladys and St.Patricks in Knock, Belfast became the first catholic grammar to play in the Ulster Rugby Schools Cup in 2019. I fell back in love with football and chose it as the sport I would play in adulthood. I had some brief dalliances with playing cricket as the local rugby club attracted more and more overseas players who found themselves in Northern Ireland for work or family reasons and were looking for something to do when rugby ended for the summer. As with most things, my interest in cricket came from watching it on tv during rainy school summer holidays....
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