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When I was harping on Leinster’s match against Zebre the weekend before last, I kept saying how there was no result the boys in blue could achieve that would help the fans get over the disappointment of Croke Park the week before, and that the same happened in May when the same Italian opponents rocked up to the Aviva seven days after the Northampton defeat.
For some reason it didn’t occur to me that Andy Farrell’s Ireland are in a similar boat today as they prepare to face Japan, although perhaps the expectations of victory in Chicago weren’t as high as the previous two weeks. Thankfully Keego spotted that in the preview show and it does make today’s test match at HQ a little less of a spectacle than it could be, which could explain why I keep getting emails about the “last remaining tickets still available”, although the easier explanation is that they’re just too goddam expensive amidst a cost of living crisis in the country, I suppose that’s a matter of opinion.
ICYMI the preview can be found here.
Whatever the reason I find myself drawn more to the double header of sorts this evening, with a fascinating Ireland XV playing Spain at 4pm and France hosting the Springboks at 8 – a veritable feast of rugby union for a Saturday that makes “getting family stuff done” something of a military operation.
Speaking of family, I thought I’d use my column this week to harp on myself for a change, or at least how I came to become enough of a fan of rugby union to maintain an online entity for the best part of two decades. It most certainly has not been the traditional route for Irish rugby fans.
And what is this “traditional route” exactly? Well, while the sport has definitely grown a lot in popularity over the years, I’m not quite sure it has yet shaken the tag of “niche”, particularly with such a complicated set of Laws continuing to form a barrier to turning casual fans who tune in for the test matches into ones who will tune in every week to my podcast.
So definitely the most common way the sport seeps into people’s souls is through family. Your grandfather once togged out with Tony Ward. Your uncle was captain of Mary’s Junior 3rds for ten years. Your big brother played in that Senior Cup team that almost beat Rock that time. And since 2013/14, plenty of inspiration for girls to get involved in women’s rugby, given the right support structures of course.
But for me, there was absolutely nothing in my past to connect me to egg-chasing, far from it. in fact, VERY far from it, over 8000km to be more precise. I lived the first 8 years of my life in a town called Pittsburg in California, though I eventually stopped telling people that in casual conversation as they usually mistook it for the one ending in ‘h’ that’s in Pennsylvania. So instead I’d use the name of the town that had the hospital where I was born, which had the much more “mom and apple pie” name of Walnut Creek.
To explain why I was raised by my grandparents, and to then explain why they brought that 8-year-old only child to Ireland, would take me way too far from the subject matter so I’ll leave you with those two facts for this article and leave the details for my memoirs 😜.
So there we were, an American couple in their early 60s and an 8-year old boy arriving in Dublin. Their dream, or at least my grandfather’s, had always been to settle in a cottage in Connemara or something like that for their retirement but with me in tow, they thought it best to settle around the capital, and obviously once here, it was important to get me established in a school.
At the time, school was just that, school. 8 year old me wasn’t going to know the difference between public and private, but now I do appreciate how fortunate I was for them to be able to get me into quite an exclusive private one. And with the new surroundings came a lot of new things to both appreciate and purchase, like school uniforms, and also uniform for some sport called rugby, which was pretty much a second religion at the school.
HARPIN' ON RUGBY 