THE SUNDAY HERALD REPORTS

Green party
By Alisdair Reid
With Scotland desperately needing to stem a downward spiral when they entertain their high-flying Celtic cousins at Murrayfield next weekend, the contrasts between the two nations have never looked so great. But, as The rise and rise of Ireland in the professional era is more to do with a series of accidents than any grand design

IN 1995, on the eve of a World Cup tournament in South Africa at which the floodwaters of rugby\'s professional future would threaten to breach the dam of its amateur past, the Irish Rugby Football Union released a statement outlining their position on the matter. Even then, its smug and self-satisfied myopia seemed startling.

\"The IRFU will oppose the payment of players to play the game,\" it said, \"and payment to others such as coaches, referees, touch-judges and members of committees for taking part in the game because the game is a leisure activity played on a voluntary basis.\"

Of course, sloth-like intransigence was not exactly unusual among rugby\'s rulers at the time, but the Irish position was particularly clod-footed just a few short months before the historic vote in Paris that dragged the game into the era of pay-for-play. In fact, its only parallel - discounting that bloke who rejected the Beatles, saying \"guitar bands are on their way out\" - was the notorious contribution of SRU chief executive Bill Hogg to a Murrayfield match programme earlier that year, in which he trumpeted the assertion, \"The position of the SRU committee is that it strongly feels that the game must remain amateur.\"

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In other words, the arrival of professionalism caught Irish rugby with its pants down, while the sport in Scotland was in no less dishevelled or more dignified a position. At the time you would probably have backed the Scots, with their reasonably successful side and glistening new stadium, to make the better fist of the challenges to come, but both were catastrophically ill-prepared for the sport\'s new realities. A dozen years on, however, and the contrasts between the two could hardly be greater.

And hardly more damning for Scotland. Over the past week it has been hard to think of the Scottish rugby landscape as anything other than a parched wasteland, its impoverished and hollow-eyed citizenry traumatised by recent events. Aside from the uncommon generosity with which the national side gifted Italy a first away win in the RBS Six Nations last weekend, we have had another swirl of transfer speculation and yet more rumours that one of the three professional sides could be disbanded at the end of the season.

And in Ireland the party goes on. In the immediate aftermath of Scotland\'s gruesome capitulation against the Italians, the rampant Irish blew England away with style, panache and a 43-13 scoreline on an afternoon of rich historical significance in the resonant surroundings of Croke Park.

It was their fourth consecutive victory against the world champions and set them the target of a second successive Triple Crown when they pitch up at Murrayfield next weekend. But for a few seconds of inattention against France a few weeks ago, they could very easily be chasing a Grand Slam.

And there\'s more. Munster are the reigning Heineken Cup champions, a triumph secured on an extraordinary Millennium Stadium occasion last May, in front of 60,000 adoring fans. Both they and Leinster have won places in the quarter-finals of this year\'s competition, while Ulster are pushing hard to retain their Magners League title. And while Scotland\'s top players flood out of the country, Ireland - for Rob Dewey and Simon Danielli at least - has become a viable destination.

Only one question about Ireland remains. Just where did it all go right?

IT IS a massive subject. The issue taxes Irish commentators, too, although it is one form of taxation they are happy to accommodate. A central point, however, is that Ireland\'s success has not been the product of a single grand masterplan; more the result of a set of happy accidents than an all-encompassing design. Their professional experience has seen as many bellicose bunglers in blazers and gin-ruddied old soaks as ours, yet somehow they have come through smiling.

On the question of where it all went wrong, however, there is unanimity across the Irish rugby community: Lens, northern France, October 20, 1999. It is a bitter evening in the grim, industrial city, and it\'s about to get more bitter still as Ireland face Argentina in a play-off for a place in the tournament\'s quarter-finals. Ireland take a comfortable lead, but the Argentines gnaw away at it, eventually and deservedly moving in front with six minutes left on the clock.

Desperately, Ireland stuff 12 men into a lineout in a bid to rescue the match. Time and again, they try to drive over from close range, and time and again they are thwarted. The final score is 28-24, and Ireland are out of the first World Cup of the professional era, beaten by a team largely comprising amateur players. It is a shattering experience for the team, its supporters and the country\'s wider sporting culture.

And a wake-up call. Leading Irish writer Brendan Fanning\'s recently- published summary of Irish rugby in the professional era, From There To Here, includes a colourful assessment of the defeat by an IRFU member of the time. \"It was embarrassing,\" said the anonymous source.

\"It came at the end of what was a very difficult transition for us from \'95. Our period from \'95 up to Lens was an absolute f***-up altogether. It was sort of a catharsis point where everybody said: OK, we\'ve reached it, now we can either play around with the professional game or get seriously into the professional game.\'\"

Hopelessly ill-prepared beforehand, Ireland had been hopelessly slow out of the blocks when professionalism arrived. The IRFU were not exactly unique in seeing the change as something between a moving of the moral goalposts and an administrative inconvenience, believing that their obligations did not extend beyond the distribution of a few pay cheques to a few players, but they sustained the most damage when the hurricane of market forces blew through their musty misconceptions.

While European administrators jaw-jawed about a one-year moratorium on professional rugby in the wake of the 1995 vote to go open, English clubs began the war-war that was the jostle for supremacy at that time.

Paying nothing more than lip-service to the moratorium - a remarkable number of leading players suddenly found employment as development officers - the clubs trawled the sport for its most talented practitioners.

Ireland was not exactly the richest source at the time, but its most celebrated players were soon queuing up for the Dun Laoghaire ferry on a one-way ticket to riches.

To make matters worse, Ireland embarked on a series of shambolic, ill-conceived and catastrophically unsuccessful foreign tours. Quite literally, they were innocents abroad, taken apart on the fields of the southern hemisphere. Minus their handful of Lions, otherwise engaged in South Africa at the time, they went to New Zealand in 1997 and were humiliated by a succession of minor provincial sides.

\"The one thing I never did in my career was not give 100%,\" said Conor O\'Shea, the celebrated former Ireland and London Irish full-back. \"In fairness to some of the guys on the tour they did give 100%, but 100% of what they had was absolute crap.\"

In other words, Ireland in the professional age just carried on where Ireland in the amateur era had left off. They were the merchants of situation-hopeless-but-never-serious. They were rugby\'s most loveable losers. They were charming, disarming and generally useless. But things were about to change.

COULD ONE pass have changed Ireland\'s rugby fortunes, setting them on the road to glory? Probably not, but it may have seemed that way to Edinburgh loose forward Iain Sinclair(IAIN S FATHER IS A PAST PRESIDENT OF GHK AND HIS BROTHER STEWART PLAYED FOR HAWKS) in January 1999 as he watched Ulster captain David Humphreys collect the European Cup at Lansdowne Road, the reward for a 21-6 victory over Colomiers in the final. The irony was that it was Sinclair who had thrown the pass.

Only a few weeks\' earlier, Edinburgh had played Ulster in the final match of their group stage. A win would propel the Scots into the last eight and put Ulster out of the tournament. Edinburgh led for almost the entire match, but the Irish side revived in the second half and ate into the home team\'s lead. In the last moments of the match, as Edinburgh clung to a narrow lead, Sinclair threw a rash pass near the left touchline, Ulster wing Sheldon Coulter collected the ball, motoring away for the decisive try and a 23-21 win that gave them the quarter-final place.

It was the season that England\'s clubs had boycotted the tournament - Bath had won the cup the previous year - so an asterisk must be placed against Ulster\'s success. But it was still a momentous achievement, not least for the marker it put down, for the expectations it raised, for the belief it fostered among Ireland\'s other sides that they, too, could live with Europe\'s elite.

The following season it was Munster\'s turn to go on the march. At the end of it, they were beaten 9-8 by Northampton in an achingly close final at Twickenham, but along the way they galvanised a mighty pack, planted the seeds that would come to fruition in the Millennium Stadium six years later and created a unique and vibrant rugby culture around their home cities of Cork and, especially, Limerick.

It is easy to forget that Munster\'s following was almost non-existent a decade ago. With crowds in the low hundreds, the province attracted negligible interest in comparison to such All Ireland League club sides as Shannon and Cork Constitution. But through the fortuitous combination of a raft of hard-nosed players - Mick Galwey, Anthony Foley and Keith Wood formed the core of the pack, with half-backs Peter Stringer and Ronan O\'Gara directing things behind the scrum - the self-confident culture of the Celtic Tiger economy and the easy travel offered by budget airlines, an astonishing rugby phenomenon took shape.

Meanwhile, an equally impressive phenomenon was stepping out of the shade for Leinster. Brian O\'Driscoll had actually made his debut for Ireland - on their 1999 tour to Australia - before he played a match for the Dublin-based province, and he was to launch himself into the rugby stratosphere in the 2000 Six Nations when he scored a hat-trick of tries in the Stade de France, helping Ireland to their first win in Paris in 27 years.

Suddenly, rugby was sexy in the Irish capital. There was a touch of the King\'s Road when O\'Driscoll teamed up with his confreres in the Leinster backline, while his A-list partnership with Irish supermodel Glenda Gilson only reinforced that image. Sponsors queued up to establish a connection with a player who was rapidly becoming the hottest property in world rugby.

When O\'Driscoll led the British and Irish Lions on their tour to New Zealand in 2005, he was one of 11 Irishmen selected for the original party - a stark contrast to Scotland\'s meagre contingent of three. That imbalance might say something about the curious approach to coaching of Sir Clive Woodward, but it still reflected the respective positions of two nations whose rugby fortunes had historically been much more closely tied together.

Yet it would be wrong to leap to the conclusion that Ireland rugby authorities have handled professionalism any more astutely than their Scottish counterparts. They have had the advantage of settled governance, but they still have the sort of unwieldy committee structure that most successful countries ditched long ago. It was their good fortune, too, to have a four-team provincial structure ready to accommodate their professional ambitions, with no significant opposition from the club tier. Again, though, these things have been matters of happy accident rather than design.

Fundamentally, they have excelled for the simple reason that good players always make a difference, and success really does breed success. Irish rugby was not remotely ready for the professional age, but its conveyor belt of talent just happened to go into overdrive at exactly the right moment. It is fascinating to consider what Scotland might have made of the new era had the celebrated intake of 1986 - Gavin and Scott Hastings, David Sole and Finlay Calder all made their debuts that year - turned up 10 years later.

In essence, Ireland have had momentum, that most precious commodity, in the early years of the 21st century. It would be a massive achievement for Scotland to put the brakes on them next weekend.

This article was originally posted on 5-Mar-2007, 12:12 by Hugh Barrow.
Last updated by Hugh Barrow on 5-Mar-2007, 12:13.