THERE ARE PEOPLE with considerable rugby expertise working for this outfit. Unfortunately for you and me I’m the only one old enough to remember every World Cup. The below is nothing more than a floating fan’s perspective; what immediately comes to mind when thinking about each of the nine tournaments so far. Feel free to leave your own memories below. Or failing that, tell me what a gowl I am.
1987
Coach Jim Davidson quipping after the quarter-final final loss to Australia that we won the second half 15-9. Why couldn’t we have played so well from the start, he wondered? Who knew? It was a light-hearted moment. There would be other World Cups, we’d leap that quarter-final hurdle soon enough.
Ireland aside, Serge Blanco’s try in the semi-final against Australia remains vivid – a thrilling French move, over and back, force and evasion, finished off with a mad dash and heroic dive to the corner. The celebration too, you could tell this meant something.
1991
Is that the line? How did they get down there so quickly? As soon as we’d stopped jumping around the sitting room after Gordon Hamilton’s try and Ralph Keyes’ conversion at the Havelock Square end, we were looking at Australia on the attack from the restart. Somehow they were already a few yards from the Lansdowne Road end tryline. Michael Lynagh’s touch down was met with enough collective silence to hear the odd groan and muffled curse. As quickly as we’d thought we might eliminate one of the tournament favourites, and ultimate winners, we were gone.
1995
I have no memory at all of whatever happened here. I did reach the legal drinking age the same year but cannot credibly claim a social life so lively as to forget a world cup. I can remember lots of other things. What took place here has been buried deep by the subconscious, for some reason.
1999
Ireland, full of desperate intent if not ideas, loading the lineout with looked like about 18 men. The plan to catch and barge through Argentina did not work. Even at the time, trying to strongarm such flinty opponents did not seem a great strategy.
So ended the World Cup, at the quarter-final play-off stage, a truly grim decade for the Ireland rugby team going with it. At least we had Simon Geoghegan in the corner at Twickenham. And Mick Galwey rounding off the 17-3 against England in 93. Berries on the briar.
2003
Brian O’Driscoll getting it down and the subsequent feeling this team would beat Australia.
A new generation that came of age with the new millennium were going to take us further than we’d managed in the barren 90s. We failed, but this felt like the best failure yet. Until we played France. But come the next time this group would set a new standard for Irish teams at the World Cup . . .
2007
The last match against Argentina was watched from a crowded bar with a feeling of light detachment. It was done by then, really. A friend who had made the trip remembers asking a nearby fan for a cigarette as the endgame played out. Someone rebuked him for smoking. His one moment of relief amid a bonfire of his savings and time had been interrupted and as he put it, “ignorance was the only fitting response” as curses flew.
Years later through work one of the Ireland players told me about the feeling of powerlessness that came with their effort to put things right. The more they struggled, the deeper they sunk into quicksand. What stayed with me was his description of the food. It wasn’t good. For a finish he went down to the hotel chef with one or two others to teach him how to make porridge. If nothing else, the comfort food would be right.
2011
A drop goals and penalties flying over from Johnny Sexton and Ronan O’Gara against Australia. The points racking up, the emotion pouring out. This time we’d beat Australia. This time we did. Only Wales to get over now and we’d be in a semi-final at last. You couldn’t beat Australia and then get chop tackled out of contention by Wales, could you?
2015
No marks for originality here, Paul O’Connell leaving the field in distress. The feeling that time was up for the generation some called golden. The closer we get to the present day, the more foggy the recall. Is this when the social media discourse around the team became especially furious? Or was it the previous World Cup? From unlucky triers just falling short in their quest to slay the quarter-final curse, to disgraceful, privileged failures sullying our national reputation. I couldn’t tell you who won. We’ll likely get Round 68 of it over the coming weeks. Something to look forward to there.
2019
This is almost in 1995 territory. Nothing from the Japan loss or hammering by New Zealand comes to mind. Just the feeling of inevitably it all held. As with before there were the moments we got our hopes up – Scotland here, France in 2015, Australia in 2011, Australia in 2003 – before calamity visited. This, it had come to feel to me at least, is just how it goes.
We go to World Cups and get disappointed. There’s a scene in The Wire where D’Angelo Barksdale is giving his thoughts on The Great Gatsby. He’s in the prison library and will soon be murdered while working a shift at the prison library.
“He’s saying that the past is always with us. Where we come from, what we go through, how we go through it — all that shit matters. … Like, at the end of the book? Boats and tides and all? It’s like, you can change up. You can say you somebody new. You can give yourself a whole new story. But what came first is who you really are, and what happened before is what really happened. It doesn’t matter that some fool say he different, ’cause the only thing that make you different is what you really do, or what you really go through.”
This could be the World Cup where Ireland really do something that makes them different. Or it could be more of the same and what came first is who we really are.
On one of our podcasts the other day Bernard Jackman said we’re going to win the World Cup. Murray Kinsella said he expects us to make the final against France. I just cannot see it.
Both my colleagues have a PhD level knowledge of rugby compared to my casual fan’s appreciation. They are analysing the team rationally, having scrutinised Ireland’s every play and the management team’s every call since 2019. I bring nothing more than a feeling based on what’s gone before, an uneasy and indefinable sense that we don’t go well in these things; that the pursuit of honour in the big competition has long since become a hangup that inhibits fluent performance.
Perhaps the pessimists among us need to look on the sunny side. Ireland’s story is nine World Cups of varying extremes of failure. But this team’s story is four years of progress and success. The baggage is in the minds of people like me, outside the arena.
Yet my nagging sense remains that there is a bit of Trigger’s brush about most teams in most sports. You can replace the head 17 times, the handle 14 – but that doesn’t make it a new broom.
