Gavin Cooney

THE NEWS FROM Britain last week was that we have become an arrogant rugby people. 

The Telegraph, now styling itself as one of Britain’s foremost defenders of western civilisation, led the charge ahead of Ireland’s Six Nations game with Wales game, citing a viral Off the Ball clip in which the presenters jokingly asked whether we’d beat Wales with 12 men along with a match preview by an unnamed Irish journalist and a couple of anecdotal episodes in ventilating a supposed “insufferable superiority” that has bred among Irish rugby fans during the heady ascent up the world rankings/through the World Cup pool stages. 

This may just be more proof of this column’s enviable worldliness, but we enjoyed both the OTB clip and the Telegraph’s treatise.

Most of the fun in the Six Nations comes from the fact everyone thinks everyone else is arrogant: the Welsh think the Irish are arrogant; the Irish think the Scots are arrogant; the Scots think the Irish are arrogant; the Irish, Welsh and Scots know the English are arrogant; and we’re all disappointed if the French aren’t arrogant. (Italy, by the way, will have finally arrived as a serious rugby nation when a Tier One nation calls them arrogant.) 

Missing in the media fall-out here was an acknowledgement that to be called arrogant by your closest rivals is a great compliment: there are those of us who dream of one day reading the British public criticise the arrogance of the Irish football team. At this stage we’d settle for a few barbs from Oman.  

Instead the Irish media chafed at this notion of arrogance, with several pundits and journalists publicly disavowing the Off the Ball clip before the game in a lesser-spotted display of pre-emptive flagellation. 

The fear here was that such crass Writing Off in Ireland would provoke in the Welsh players a performance great enough to win the game and wreck Ireland’s Grand Slam,  and wouldn’t it be awful to feel we brought the defeat in on ourselves. 

Hidden within this is a deeper insult to the Welsh players, of course. Have these guys really been so unprofessional that the reason they were stuck in a 14-match losing run was because they hadn’t yet found a trio of sports breakfast presenters to take the piss out of them? 

But, hey, all’s well that ends well. Wales were liberated by Warren Gatland’s exit and played well enough to feel good about themselves. Ireland, meanwhile, kept the Grand Slam show on the road and three Off the Ball presenters out of witness protection. 

Ultimately, arrogance is no bad thing, given it’s impossible to be a serially successful team without being arrogant. 

Winning all the time means refusing to ever lose, and to do this any sportsperson has to treat defeat less as something that simply happens but instead as a mortally offensive thing. And to internalise that affront, it’s best to convince yourself that defeat is utterly beneath you. 

This is what Erling Haaland was probing when he told Arsenal manager Mikel Arteta to “stay humble” after Man City’s acrimonious 2-2 draw earlier this season: stay humble, stay second. At no point did Haaland himself show any pretence to humility, immediately asking Myles Lewis-Skelly, “who the fuck are you?” 

Rugby is no different. Consider the arrogance necessary for the All Blacks to finesse, export and profit from their brand of thought leadership and false humility. You’ve only been reading an abridged version of their creed: Sweep The Sheds and Make Sure Everyone Knows You Swept Them. 

Though the classic Irish rugby fan is hardly afflicted with a lack of self-confidence as it is, they really should (continue to) read the Telegraph and embrace the arrogance, as it is an antidote to the far more corrosive national characteristic of begrudgery. 

The best definition of begrudgery comes from the writer Breandán O’hEithir, who classes it as “a deep and abiding doubt of our ability to run our own affairs as well as others might run them for us”, styling it as an especially cynical form of pessimism, given the begrudger “has an unshakable faith in matters always turning out much worse than expected.” 

Irish football continues to labour beneath this mindset, with the historic factions and splits between the game showing few signings of healing. A recent vote among the FAI membership to move the entire sport here to the same calendar season rejuvenated the old enmities. A subsequent statement from one of the largest amateur football affiliates opposing the move claimed the vote was flawed, saying FAI staff had “interfered” to convince the League of Ireland side of the house to vote in favour of the move. 

Consider the objection here: a democratic vote has been rendered invalid because those entitled to a vote turned up and voted. This is an argument rooted in the fact one part of the game here sees itself as independent of another, rather than as an integrated part of one, coherent system. For as long as this attitude prevails, Irish football will continue to strangle itself. At least the British media can’t accuse it of getting carried away with itself.

Irish rugby, by contrast, has freed itself from such stogging nonsense, and should realise that there are far worse fates than to be called arrogant by those you routinely beat.