Ireland - are we really good enough?

HFXOC

What must it be like to be from a country, where, when your national team takes part in a competition you expect to win.

No matter what game is played, be it soccer or rugby, or when an athlete represents this country at the Olympics, we never are sure that Ireland will be the winner.

Too often, the phrases ' spirited Irish, 'gutsy performance' or 'achieved a personal best, despite being eliminated' are used in the reporting of events.

We never expect to win and consequently, we are seldom distraught when we don't. Although, the bookies talk up our chances at times and individual journalsits sometimes get ahead of themselves our makeup places us in the 'well done, nice try' category.

Face it, Ireland will always there abouts, but never right there.

'Its not the winning but the taking part that counts'. I wish sometimes that we would win, win well, expect to win and be gutted when we don't.

Am I alone on this or are there others who hate being second best?

the fnj

Perhaps we should bring in a mandatory doping for all our elite athletes? Worked for the communists.

I think we always out perform for such a small island, we have only four million people despite that, we have a solid enough soccer team and our rugby team is probably in the top five teams in the world at the moment.

A lot of sports are grossly under funded in this country too and we have poor facilities for elite athletes. Were kind of a Rocky style against all the odds country and I do think Irish athletes in all sports do produce "gutsy performances" when representing the country at big events.

We also seem to be able to produce one world class athlete at a time. We need a new Sonya but I’m sure there is another one on the way.

Hairy Homer

Originally posted by HFXOC

Face it, Ireland will always there abouts, but never right there.

'Its not the winning but the taking part that counts'. I wish sometimes that we would win, win well, expect to win and be gutted when we don't.

Am I alone on this or are there others who hate being second best?

'If all the year were playing holidays, to sport would be as tedious as to work'

Shakespeare, Hernry IV part one.

Taking the drubbings for years on end make the victories all the sweeter when they come. Look at the English at the end of the game. Did they look elated? No. More relieved than anything else. The stock quote seemed to be 'It would have been horrible had we lost'

Where's the fun in that?

Just imagine the party we're going to have when we beat NZ for the first time. There are some countries who just don't have the prospect of something like that to look forward to.

Poor them. :-)

hallelujajordan

Originally posted by Hairy Homer


Just imagine the party we're going to have when we beat NZ for the first time. There are some countries who just don't have the prospect of something like that to look forward to.

Poor them. :-)

Just hope I'm still around to see it !

suppafly

Just imagine the party we're going to have when we beat NZ for the first time. There are some countries who just don't have the prospect of something like that to look forward to

we should have beaten during our tour of there last summer but O'Gara missed a couple of easy peno's and we would have won had he put them over.

spanner

i would agree with the statement that we are a small nation and for our size and the fact that we do have our own game which is very popular we do put up some games in soccer and rugby

just think that every world cup we have gone to we have always progressed passed the group stages and countries like scotland which always seem to qualify but have still to pass the group stages. i think every soccer competition we enter we always do well

some people in this country think we should beat everyone in soccer and rugby, i think we do well relitive to our size and the complete lack of funding that is avilable to sport

uberwolf

mention made of infrastructure and funding is accurate, I'm a cyclist and 3 years ago(I think) a young fella from sligo won the world champs(junior) the next year he got a government grant of 3.5k, the top brit who'd been racing against him, and came nowhere, got 18 or so thousand sterling. This is the support at the most elite level, he got there by himself. In a few years when he wins a tour stage, we'll have another instance of a politician hopping on the bandwagon-see charles Haughey and '87 tour. Until the attitude changes it'll remain the same...

spanner

say congrats to your friend for me, its good to see anyone irish doing well in their choosen sport

i do agree with you and even though we are a small country and cant afford to give to much we could support athlietics a bit better

Winters

Excepting to win everything in our wake is something that this country will never do.

The simple reason is that our sporting associations are choosing from much smaller pools of players and athletes than their rivals.

We should in theory be comparing our sporting teams to nations of similiar sizes such as Scotland, Wales, Estonia, Latvia etc. instead of England, France, Portugal, Spain and similar sized countries.

The reason that we dont is because we are a fighting nation and since the famine we always have been.

To be feared or respected by those larger nations is something that we should be proud of.

Imagine, World Cup 2002.. Ireland hold their own against Spain
5 million population verses 40 million population? A success story in itself and that happens year in year out.

*** FIGHTING IRISH***

daveirl

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