We see that Munster Rugby moved swiftly against those t-shirts that surfaced recently in Limerick after the decision to allow pubs to open for Good Friday’s clash with Leinster. You know the ones, sporting the slogan ‘Officially Bigger Than the Catholic Church: Munster Rugby’.
No surprise there.
The sighing sound which accompanied the withdrawal of those tops came from a thousand hacks, disappointed at the removal of an obvious starting point for ‘The decline started here’ paragraph they’re planning for a few years hence.
Yet that’s far from the most interesting aspect of the game this coming Good Friday: there are all sorts of interesting sideshows here that can occupy our time.
For instance, while we don’t claim to be legal experts in any way, shape or form, how was permission granted for an exemption for an ‘exceptional’ event when the evidence for that exemption consisted of examples of revenue generated by previous meetings between Munster and Leinster in the Magners League – i.e. not so much exceptional events as regularly occurring fixtures? Well, one for the men in the wigs there.
What about other sports implications? On one level there are few enough immediate ramifications: the only other day of the year on which bars are closed is Christmas Day, and it’s difficult to think of any sports organisation which would seek to arrange events for that morning.
The feeling that the Church has got one in the eye isn’t entirely accurate – it’s the law of the land which dictates that bars are closed on Good Friday, not the men in black (and a little white) – but it’s a hard one to shake, for obvious reasons. The Church has had a pretty bad time of it of late, and anything which seems to knock it on the head – however vaguely that blow is delivered – is going to meet with a broad welcome.
What would be very interesting would be a reaction from some of the teaching clerics – the various orders of priests, monks and Brothers both Christian and Presbyterian – in schools which are so intimately associated with rugby.
No more than the GAA, the strength of rugby for decades in Ireland has been linked directly to various academies around the country, and though their influence, and personnel, may be dwindling, it would be intriguing to hear their views on the Good Friday exemption.
A wider issue doesn’t revolve exclusively around Friday’s game, but it’s been crystallised nicely in the last couple of weeks’ debate about the exemption, and that centres on the relationship between drink and sport.
More precisely, maybe, the relationship between those drinking and attending sport. When news of the Good Friday game first broke there was much heavy-handed ribbing of rugby supporters – you’d want a good few pints on board to face that, ho, ho, ho – but that’s a rise you could get from a lot of sports and a lot of spectators.
To judge from a sizeable number of the supporters we’ve seen at events across the codes in the last few years, they’d want a good few pints on board not so much to face their chosen game but to face the ground in front of their seat, which would be a fairer description of some of them by the end of the event.
We don’t advocate breathalysers on the turnstiles, and we freely admit to an inconsistency in our own personal stance — your correspondent has no hesitation in confessing that before he found his current vocation, he often had a drink before watching a game, but never missed the throw-in as a result.
(He rejects the cruel suggestion circulated by ‘acquaintances’ that he only discovered there were minor curtain-raisers to big championship GAA games when paid by this newspaper to attend).
The amount of extreme public drunkenness to be found in or around the big sports events in the Irish calendar is no joke, however.
Ask anybody who stumbles, sober, through Jones Road a few hours after the end of an All-Ireland final/rugby international/soccer international in the last couple of years. They’ll tell you.
Friday night in Limerick may not be the best example to prove that assertion, oddly enough; there may be 26,000 punters heading to Thomond Park for a rugby match, but expect a sizeable crowd to arrive in the Treaty City simply because it is the only place in Ireland with drink freely on offer.
When we say ‘sizeable crowd’, you can read the words ‘buses of raving madmen guzzling cans until they arrive on Shannonside’.
On the plus side, all of the above may negate the need for people to behave at off-licences as though they were trying to find the last golden ticket for Willie Wonka’s Chocolate Factory. Small mercies.
Is it any wonder the gardaí in Limerick are getting themselves ready with New Year’s Eve-level preparations? As for Munster and their role in all of this, it was a wise move to crack down on those ‘Bigger Than God’ t-shirts. The last person to say they were bigger than Jesus was John Lennon, the man who went on to inflict ‘Imagine’ on us.
A prospect that would drive anyone to drink.
