The Irish

Australia Ireland in the 91 WC is my earliest and most painful sporting memory. You'll never take that away from me darragh

I remember that well, I think I was too young to feel the pain. It's more my first memory of exhilarating sport.

Game face off for a sec, wc 95 and simon geoghegan and all that seemed like the advent of rugby taking off (out west obv) and the golden generation and club successes have made it a widespread sport to follow all over (except connacht i still think)- but i also think you'd have to acknowledge it can prob only fall from current popularity, and ime there is no grassroots outside of the rugby schools.....

Fair play to them tho theyve punched well above their weight a long time now, and could really teach our footy lads (and mayo obv) a thing or two abt matchday mentality

is it falling from popularity though? i dont see that. it seems as popular maybe even more popular than GAA in rural areas atm

Think they manage it well around the gaa calendar- would say that it co-exists happily with the gaa but soccer seems to be viewed as a competitor (prob cos national team, trips to dub and abroad to watch them both, etc?) and thats been at a low ebb as rugby has powered on....monkeano 2 reverse that once bod dies

ireland must be in the top ten or so countries in the world for amount of fuck given about sports per capita

all the anglo sports except cricket and maybe tennis with above average interest in golf and horses, and gaa on top of that

yeah we fucking love sports

Athletics does well interest wise
Gaa goes crazy for the few months of the year

Rugby- half of us go mad for it

Golf- half mad

horses- half mad

Soccer- mad

We'll watch anything if we can drink during sure

And to continue to claim malahide as northside is shambles on every level except for geographically imo, disgraceful sleight-of-land imo

wrong. it's not a poor area but north county dublin is a v diff place to south dublin. i don't have any personal claims about my class or whatever but i don't really get the south dublin thing either, it's a v diff world, compact, close-knit, nearer south city centre etc.

Game face off for a sec, wc 95 and simon geoghegan and all that seemed like the advent of rugby taking off (out west obv) and the golden generation and club successes have made it a widespread sport to follow all over (except connacht i still think)- but i also think you'd have to acknowledge it can prob only fall from current popularity, and ime there is no grassroots outside of the rugby schools.....

no way it can only fall from popularity though, the sport is well-run, frequently entertaining, and ireland have some of the best players and clubs in the world. connacht is growing too, it's all growing, as long as international football remains turgid and faintly corrupt rugby will keep growing. we can't claim to produce any significantly good footballers anymore, not relative to rugby when we have 2/3 all-time greats and 4/5 world class players.

aiden mcgeady would be a world class football player if it were only played in ireland/uk, new zealand/australia/south africa/france/italy/argentina/polynesia

although maybe argentina in that list raises the world class level a bit about poor old aiden

/above/

will you stop banging on about mcgeady? everyone knows hes shit

he wouldn't be world class even if it was only played in ireland/uk

not shit! but anyway, he's a placeholder there for the argument that world class necessarily means less in rugby than football, replace him with james mccarthy and he would probably be one of the best ten midfielders from that list of nations, but wouldn't be in a list of thirty worldwide

this supports lg's reasoning though, that success breeds popularity and the reasonable prospect of international success is in the favour of rugby wrt football

can't argue with that, but i'm not sure that relative lack of meaning translates to fans, plus the smaller size of union does tend to mean better teams playing each other more often. that concentration of power does have its advantages.

xpost yeah like it's not that diff from gaa really, nobody is going to start talking about world class in an ireland-only sport but on a small island people are still going to get excited when an accessible team sport based on technical skills and aggression is practised well. rugby does appeal to the disgruntled uk/ire football fan too in some ways, with less of the class stuff in ireland to drag it down (despite what deems says!)

International rules football (Irish: Peil na rialacha idirnáisiunta; also known as inter rules in Australia and compromise rules in Ireland) is a team sport consisting of a hybrid of football codes, which was developed to facilitate international representative matches between Australian rules football players and Gaelic football players.

There is a great Apres Match clip about international rules.

http://youtu.be/CTog_cbfH-g

nakh has prob repped for mcgeady more than anyone else who has ever had to watch him on ilx

to the level of trolling tbfh

Rugby is ridic popular among all the GAA types I know, including the All-Stars. Popularity of golf and horse-racing probably underrated upthread too.

did we? i thought we paid them due respect tbh!

idk, maybe it was my ~circles~ but people fucking LOVE their golf and horses ime, and anything else seems underrating it.

heh maybe

my 'half mad' is a reference to half of the country being fucking *mad* about em tbf

all the anglo sports except cricket and maybe tennis with above average interest in golf and horses, and gaa on top of that

― carla jenkinvingne (nakhchivan), Sunday, 24 November 2013 19:19 (3 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

they qualified for the T20 World Cup only today

ye'll have cricket e'en so's it's so you'll develop yer eoin morgans and boyd rankins and hand 'em over when ripe

― veneer timber (imago), Friday, 22 November 2013 05:39 (2 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah but no one cares

unless we beat the English obvs

there was a tiny ripple of interest when we beat England that time but that was cos y'know, we beat England

yeah that's the interest in other sports, the chance to beat the brits obv

re: golf- interest comes and goes a good bit imo, but when the ryder cup or w/e comes along it's feverish

yeah but no one cares

― Number None, Sunday, 24 November 2013 22:39 (1 minute ago)

right

feel like horses are the real irish sport

~glory~

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=imqwnWWegVI

mmm, but all the golf courses/pitch & putts throughout the country though? I'm sure I read we had one of the highest golf course/people rations in the world.

also, we have actually produced golfers worthy of the Ryder Cup & they'd be pretty recognised.

well we're kinda a golf course waiting to happen all over the country- had an argument with tuomas before on this re it being an elite sport everywhere in the world- and with that comes production of golfers i guess....kinda like being one of relatively few countries playing rugby (tho for rugby it's through an infrastructure of private schools and privilege obv)

but im not arguing that golf isn't a big sport here!

but it is one of them that swells and ebbs every few years. snooker, darts, f1- often i dont wonder if they each have a few years in cycle with what RTE covers that few years or w/e- but yeah golf's over that plateau now ito the availability and popularity of participation

ah golf is big at every major ime - more in terms of watching it than necessarily playing it tho.

club membership out west is about 100 quid a year and most lads would have a set of clubs or access to same, so plenty would play it regularly when weather allows but yeah again with a big event interest peaks ito watching/discussion

blather and dhrink is still a big part of irish interest in whatever is on tv tho id say, we're all experts on the high jump once every four years etc

Or the laser...

don't know if that's peculiar to the Irish so much as pub folk in general

maybe it's the prevalence of pub folk then......

well that wd follow, but that sudden knowledgeability about any sport no matter how obscure, you come across that on an afternoon round any bar where two or three regulars are gathered i think

nah scratch that, i mean a certain kind of pub and tbf there are more of that kind of pub over your way to the best of my knowledge

well we need to put all of our bar-room experts somewhere

blather and dhrink is still a big part of irish interest in whatever is on tv tho id say

betting is another factor to take into account too here

which is part and parcel of dhrink i suppose

musha and tis

http://www.vice.com/en_uk/read/why-isnt-ireland-doing-anything-about-its-heroin-problem