Hooray!

Well, I've just about begun to settle down after Saturday afternoon's excitement. I don't know if I'll even bother to try and put into words how I felt, what the thing meant, the streets, the crowds, the beer, the beer, the beer, the tears, the pain, the relief, the agony, the joy, the noise in that fucking stadium must have been unbearable, I believe. I couldn't get to Cardiff myself, but the brother had bought tickets back in January. "You gotta have faith" he texted to me as the final whistle went and fat tear drops plopped in metronomical succession into my beer. What a jammy bastard I thought, sniffing and wiping away excess fluid with the back of my hand. Well, on reflection, that wasn't jamminess (if such a word exists), rather it was simply a little bit of forward planning. But still though, what a jammy little bit of forward planning that was. And wasn't he the jammy little fucker to think of doing that !

What an occasion for a team that represented the hopes and dreams of a province - of a nation even! The players and fans carried around the flags of Munster and of Ireland. Sky Slime lapped it up, of course, along with their willing bitches in the ERC. According to one reporter from French sports daily L'Equipe, this was the occasion when rugby outplayed soccer for the level of occasion, the level of noise, colour and celebration, with a superb game of 2 teams at their peaks battling it out below. Even though I was watching my team play on our own national television station, after-match interviews came courtesy of the Sky slime team. They didn't even wait until next season's kick-off: they were already swarming all over the pitch, microphone in hand, chattering with insane excitement as though they were all on high-performance, colour-enhancing drugs.

Saturday was a moment to savour, whether experienced in the Millenium or in the bar of a West Cork hotel. It was an occasion, a sporting occasion that brought the province and the nation and half of Europe together. But this was the last time that we'll be able to experience it like that: this was the last time that this occasion can happen like this. If Munster win again next year, most of the people won't be watching it. It's as simple as that. It's a cynical attempt by Sky Shiteaters Inc to get people like us to pay them for their turgid package of channels which contain so much excrement, that it isn't physically possible to sit and watch even a fraction of it. A new generation of young kids will grow up in Ireland wondering who the hell is Ronan O'Gara. Make it stop. Get in touch.