Indeed, the opening montage was even accompanied by an especially mournful version of Wicked Game, when the tune is plenty mournful enough, over images of inconsolable Irish rugby players and fans from 2019. Although, to signal a new dawn, it then broke in to a more upbeat number called Die In This Town, which includes the line: “Nitty gritty, this ain’t gonna be pretty”. In the build-up, though, the 2019 postmortem persisted, Joe Molloy reminding us of just how “dismal” a year it was for Irish rugby, adding, somewhat ominously, that “Andy Farrell was party to what went wrong . Andy, he told us, wasn’t “running around like a blue-arsed fly”, as, he said, Joe used to do – everything feeling a bit more relaxed. Nitty gritty, it wasn’t pretty, but sure look, the new dawn is up and running, a win’s a win.

Source: The Irish Times February 01, 2020 20:48 UTC