Michael Moynihan

THE ROOM was packed in Jury’s yesterday in Cork, row upon row of journalists waiting for Declan Kidney and his staff to arrive for a briefing.
If the seating had been tiered the scene would have resembled an old-fashioned medical school lecture theatre, with students about to witness a gory operation – or, in yesterday’s case, presumably a lengthy, detailed autopsy.
Given France’s emphatic destruction of Ireland less than a week previously, all sorts of similes involving sharpened pens might have been invoked.
That’s not how it turned out.
The press conference ran less than eleven minutes, soup to nuts. There were no eviscerations – real or metaphorical – from Kidney, who spoke calmly about the previous Saturday’s defeat by France and trotted briskly through the injury situation.
Les Kiss comfortably fielded a dropping ball about his defensive system, and it was all over.
You could say several things about the press conference. That journalists have no stomach for forensic dissection of poor performances by Ireland. That the Ireland coaching team had little wish to advance hostages to forune a week-and-a-half out from the game with England. That cramming so many adults into a small, warm room deadens the electrical impulses in everybody’s brain.
It’s possible there may be another interpretation. If an organisation takes the cue for its organisational culture from the man at the top, then Declan Kidney’s low-key, undemonstrative style must be even more influential than you’d think; that approach was a suitable one yesterday.
The hysteria surrounding Ireland’s Grand Slam last year was entirely unsurprising, particularly as the issue was in doubt, literally, until the last second. Hence the disproportionate gloom over the defeat by France last weekend, with the hysteria slanted one hundred and eighty degrees in the opposite direction.
Kidney’s level-headedness is a useful corrective to that overreaction (which was correctly diagnosed as such on Monday by Charlie Mulqueen of this parish); you could maybe call it an appropriate pitch for post-Celtic Tiger Ireland, even.
But while the matter-of-fact tone at yesterday’s gig was calming, it certainly wasn't tranquilising. The coach put the Paris defeat down not to French superiority, but to communication problems on the Irish side; he also introduced a note of reality: “There’s nothing surer in sport than that you’re going to lose some day.”
True enough. And there are fewer things surer in sport than the prospect of a mountain being created out of a molehill when it comes to the GAA – Nemo Rangers, in this case – and other sports – the Irish team and their training schedule, in this case. But that’s something we’ll revisit on Monday.