Each to their own — Test was anything but meaningless friendly
Martin O’Neill wasn’t the only one to rein in his enthusiasm when the Nations League was thrust upon us this year but he paid a bigger price for his indifference to it than most.
There was always the sense that the now former Republic of Ireland manager never quite grasped the true value of Uefa’s prized new project.
“The bigger picture is the Euro qualifiers,” O’Neill said as recently as last Saturday, seemingly unaware that words like ‘relegation’ don’t tend to go down too well with the people signing the cheques, regardless of context.
It was an error in judgment that contributed to the Derry man departing his post, but, to be fair, he was far from alone this week in confusing what exactly constitutes a competitive fixture and what we can safely say is a ‘friendly’.
We all know where this is going, right?
Ireland’s defeat of New Zealand in the Aviva Stadium last Saturday wasn’t long in luring the usual suspects out into the endless, lawless prairies of the internet, their ire and withering comments on what they saw as the diluted value of the entire exercise polluting Twitter and Facebook as well as pubs and offices all over the country.
That some don’t care for rugby is fine. Each to their own. That some insist on peddling the line that this was ‘only a friendly’ is beyond tiresome.
It is a view shaped by an inability to see sport through any other prism but that which they have become accustomed and wedded.
It is a refusal to look at the world through anyone else’s eyes.
The sporting landscape makes for a stunning vista but so many choose to revel in their tunnel vision.
It is a blind indifference that brings to mind the tourist who decamps to the Costa del Sol, starts the day with a fry-up, ends it with a pint in the nearest Irish pub and then moans about the fact that there are just too many Spaniards about the place.
Or, ‘foreigners’, as some would put it.
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It was a Test match. Anyone who watched 30 seconds of it could see that this was no relation to the Republic of Ireland v Northern Ireland.
That it all happened on a week when football was sidetracked by the botch job that is the Nations League and the accompanying round-up of grim friendlies only accentuated the value of what rugby has always had in these fixtures — and the threat now posed to them in World Rugby vice-president Agustin Pichot’s plans for the sport’s own version of Uefa’s new convoluted construct.
Rugby is an outlier in this sense. Not unique.
It isn’t so long since the Ryder Cup was being lambasted by the fun busters.
A nothing event, we were told. A makey-up construct devoid of real meaning. A bastardised team event in a sport where individuality is everything.
If there isn’t a tournament wall chart to map it all, some will just never take it seriously.
What else could we pour scorn on because it doesn’t ‘conform’?
The annual Boat Race? 189 years old it may be, but what is it just two crews stuffed with college boys cruising down the Thames?
Or Test cricket? Two centuries of tradition and competition but maybe we should dismiss it all as a litany of mere ‘friendlies’.
Or maybe we should accept them for what they are.
“The aim of English Test cricket is, in fact, mainly to beat Australia,” said the English cricketer Jim Laker almost 60 years ago. That still stands.
It doesn’t have to be any more complicated than that. India v Pakistan in a Test series is a standalone event. Try telling 1.5 billion people on the subcontinent it’s really just a friendly.
When England won the Ashes back in 2005 the team was paraded through London from the Mansion House to Trafalgar Square.
Tony Blair hosted them at 10 Downing Street.
It may have been overblown but people weren’t prompted to line the streets in their thousands by a game without meaning.
Winning the Ashes didn’t have any wider ramifications in a pure sporting sense beyond that five-test, two-month series and yet it still reads as one of the most captivating sporting chapters in modern times.
The same will be said about Ireland v New Zealand by those of a less jaundiced view for decades to come.
People forget how far the national team has had to travel just to get to a point where they can beat New Zealand twice in three attempts.
Ireland went 23 games and 25 years between 1979 and 2002 without a single win against one of the three Sanzar giants.
It’s only in the last four years where they have been begun to win more games than they’ve lost against them.
Japan next year remains the ultimate barometer for this Ireland team and their success, or otherwise, there will decide just how last weekend’s win is ultimately framed.
Whatever happens next, it was anything but a meaningless friendly.