“Dublin is the best music city in the world. I’ve been everywhere and nowhere is better than Dublin,” Neil from Seapoint said triumphantly outside of Philomena’s pub in Covent Garden.
Neil and Jim go to one Six Nations away game a year. Last year they were in Edinburgh for the game against Scotland and the year before they were in Paris for the loss against France.
But this year was different.
“This is England – for the Grand Slam – on St. Patrick’s Day – how could you not come to this?” Neil asks with his hands raised by his side and his shoulders shrugged.
A few blocks away from Neil and Jim is Jodie from Limerick. Jodie moved over to London eight years ago and she hovers outside the front of The Coach & Horses mingling with regulars Jimmy and Martin.
Jimmy has no real interest in rugby and tells me about London’s East End and Chelsea’s problems in midfield, while Martin is wary of Joe Schmidt’s Ireland and is uneasy about the prospect of an Irish Grand Slam against an English team that has started to lose its way after a sustained period of dominance.
“They make me nervous” Martin tells me.
Twickenham has been unkind to Irish teams over the last eight years but the fans that walked down London Road and into the Cabbage Patch, The Shack 68 and The William Webb Ellis did so with a spring in their step.
“I think we’re too confident,” said John from Sligo.
“We have a great team but everyone I’ve talked to thinks we’re going to win and that’s usually not a good sign.”
The Irish sports psyche has almost conditioned some to think that confidence and defeat share a symbiotic relationship, while a bad run at Cheltenham and a nightmare from Un De Sceaux has John convinced a bad week could get much worse.
In the Cabbage Patch Irish fans are jammed from wall to wall. A man walks around with a Shamrock Hat on his head and a sign plastered to the front of his hat that reads in bold, block letters ‘I NEED TICKETS’.
The irony is is that he can find tickets just outside of the pub as touts lurk like sharks looking to prey on seals. £400 is the price that is quoted to me by a man with a jacket zipped up to his nose as snow falls around us.
As the hours pass and kick-off nears, the demand for tickets rise. Every second conversation invariably starts with ‘do you have tickets to the game?’
Those that do have tickets tell stories about how they got them and who they know, while those that don’t bounce around the pubs looking for anyone that might be looking to offload any spares.
An old man outside of the pub starts talking to his friends about how he heard of a friend paying £300 for a ticket and he immediately started shaking his head.
I told him on Viagogo they started at £900 and rose to as much as £11,000 on some sites.
“11,000?” he asks.
“Who bought that ticket? Michael O’Leary?”
I told him that O’Leary could be a bit preoccupied with Ryanair today given the conditions before he fired back ‘No sure he wouldn’t fly with them, even he’d take Aer Lingus.”
Inside the Cabbage Patch space is at an absolute premium.
“Get four pints,” a voice bellows to a friend at the front of the bar. “We’ll be waiting here until half-time so you might as well.”
Come on You Boys in Green and the Fields of Athenry soon follow as Italy and Scotland goes down to the wire in the early game. Both Irish and English fans had been cheering Tommaso Allan’s and Matteo Minozzi’s tries earlier in the day but when Greig Laidlaw sealed a Scottish comeback with a late penalty they were immediately cut to ribbons.
“Bottlers. Absolute bottlers. They couldn’t close a door.”
Incidentally, Paul from Limerick had been watching the game by the door with his cousin’s friends Sasha and Amy. The pair had come to Twickenham from Milton Keynes and were tasked with looking after Paul while his cousins went to the match.
“Why didn’t you go with them” I asked him.
“We could only get six tickets and I was the seventh,” he replied.
“Were you a late invite to the Whatsapp group,” I joked, trying to lighten his mood.
“I started the fucking Whatsapp group,” he fired back.
Not to be deterred by having to watch the game at the pub while his extended family witnessed history down the road, Paul ripped into ‘Come on You Boys in Green’ when the television showed Rory Best standing at the front of the tunnel.
The atmosphere had been building all day and this was the moment they’d been waiting for.
Ireland’s Call was first and then God Save the Queen followed next, before the pub anthems of Swing Low was met by The Fields of Athnery.
Garry Ringrose’s try had the ground shaking as an Irish flag somehow had started waving in a room as compact as a can of sardines.
“Get the flag down, we can’t see,” a voice from the back shouted.
“Keep her up, today’s the f**king day,” another voice roared back.
It was the day. CJ Stander’s try sent London Road into a frenzy and Jacob Stockdale’s match finishing score prompted choruses of ‘Ole, Ole, Ole’ that could be heard across two lanes of traffic.
The Irish fans went to Twickenham with an heir of confidence and left with a Grand Slam.
Dublin may be the best music city in the world but the noise on London Road after an Irish win on St. Patrick’s Day is the sweetest sound you’ll ever hear.
