Ireland has a rich history in the field of World Cup shambles but few subsequent adventures have been as chaotic as the inaugural Rugby World Cup in 1987.
From a national controversy about the hastily selected 'anthem', which lit up the letters pages for days afterwards, to the head coach winding up in hospital before the start, to the borderline inhumane travel schedule which left players wrecked for the matches, the '87 World Cup was a catalogue of mishaps and misfortune.
Of course, if the IRFU had their way initially, none of it would have happened at all and Irish rugby wouldn't still be lumbered with an infamous quarter-final hex.
When the Australia-New Zealand sponsored World Cup proposal came before the International Rugby Board in March 1985, Ireland were one of the last holdouts against it.
The idea of a World Cup had been floated before; it would have been perverse if it hadn't. The football World Cup had been going since 1930. Rugby League, a sport played seriously by three countries, had a World Cup since the mid-50s. The Cricket World Cup had begun in the mid-70s, even before the Kerry Packer-led shake-up of the sport.
In union, however, there were fears that a World Cup would hasten the march towards professionalism, which had the game's custodians permanently on their guard. The IRFU were especially hawkish on the matter.
The alickadoos had the support of many in the media, with the Irish Times rugby correspondent Edmund 'Ned' Van Esbeck describing their reasons for opposing "extremely logical and very sound."
In his article of 12 March, Van Esbeck outlined the reasons, predicting that it would "mean the end, effectively, of Lions tours" and that "the Irish are worried, and rightly, about the possible effect on the International Championship," [aka, the Five Nations].
Irish rugby's self-perception as true amateurs in an era of creeping 'shamateurism' was part of the rationale and there were fears of contamination from less noble rugby cultures.
"What is acceptable in New Zealand and what passes for amateur status would certainly not be acceptable here," Van Esbeck wrote.
Of the eight-member IRB committee - the Five Nations and the three Southern Hemisphere powers - the Australians and the Kiwis were the chief advocates for the tournament, with the French also enthusiastic. The so-called 'Home Nations' were thought to be in the vanguard of the opposition.
However, the word in the lead-up was that England and Wales were both for turning on the matter and are believed to have swung in favour on the day.
When the World Cup idea was finally endorsed at the Paris meeting on 22 March, Van Esbeck's report the following day led with South Africa's initial inclusion in the project. South Africa remained voting members of the IRB, though they rarely played international matches anymore, aside from a few widely condemned 'rebel' tours here and there.
In any event, the Springboks would ultimately be excluded from both the first World Cup and the second edition in 1991, only returning to the fold after apartheid was finally done away with in the 'Whites Only' referendum of March 1992.
In theory, Ireland should have been in good shape to give the first World Cup a decent rattle. We were only two years removed from the thrilling Triple Crown victory of '85. The celebrated backline from that campaign was still entirely in place - MacNeill, Ringland, Mullin, Kiernan, Crossan, Dean, Bradley.
While the 1986 Five Nations was a familiar cold shower - another whitewash - Ireland had smashed England 17-0 in the '87 championship and recorded another in what was to become a long parade of victories in Cardiff.
Ciaran 'Where's Your F****n' Pride' Fitzgerald had fallen out of favour after the 1986 comedown and Donal Lenihan, a regular since 1981, had been elevated to the captaincy.
The tournament was scheduled for May and June, as the 1995 one would also be, though all others have been played in autumn.
As would happen often over the years, the IRFU were caught between the merits of organising warm-up matches and the desire to avoid injuries. First time around, it was anxieties over the latter that won out. Happily, this outcome also saved them the bother of organising any matches in preparation for a tournament about which they were lukewarm.
More retro was their insistence that no training sessions take place prior to flying out. One of the amateur era regulations, often offended against no doubt, was that teams should not meet up 36 hours before an international match lest their preparation veer into the realms of the professional.
Anxious they get some training in beforehand, Lenihan did arrange a few sessions himself in Donnybrook without the selectors present and they crammed in another workout in the surrounds of Gatwick airport near the start of their marathon trip.
It was on the way down to one of the Dublin gatherings that Ulster trio Nigel Carr, David Irwin and Philip Rainey were caught up in the IRA bomb blast targeting high profile Judge Maurice Gibson. While all the players survived, Carr, a starting flanker in '85 and a future UTV sports presenter, was forced into premature retirement at the age of 27. Irwin and Rainey somehow recovered in time to make the World Cup squad. Judge Gibson and his wife Cecily were killed.
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That plane journey was a major ordeal and Ireland's tournament itinerary overall was particularly unforgiving. Roy Keane was still just an underage prospect at Rockmount and the notion of an Irish international team flying business class was but a crazy dream.
Cramped in economy class, they flew from Dublin-Gatwick-Los Angeles-Honolulu and then onto New Zealand. Severe fog in Auckland forced the pilot to land in Wellington. From there, they were obliged to head to Auckland for the opening dinner and then back to Wellington for their opening match against Wales.
The inaugural dinner was an important set-piece before the off. Neil Francis isn't writing in the media currently but his wonderfully entertaining account of the '87 World Cup written in 2015 is an example of what he did best.
The Irish were first into the dining hall for the dinner. Francis recounts how he and Philip Matthews went over and hoisted the Webb Ellis trophy aloft, the lid falling off and hitting the floor with the clatter. As they picked it up, Buck Shelford and his Kiwi boys wandered into the room. "We felt like a 12 year old kid who'd just been caught playing with his 22-year old brother's Fender Stratocaster," Franno wrote.
One of the most entertaining members of the Irish party was absent for the opening dinner. Mick Doyle had been coaching Ireland for nearly three years at that point but had yet to replicate the sensational success of his first season in charge.
Though a Kerryman by birth, Doyle was primarily associated with Leinster, coaching them to a period of complete dominance in the interpros in the first half of the 1980s.
His arrival into the national team job coinciding with Ollie Campbell's retirement, Doyle shocked the press corps by picking Paul Dean, a non-kicking out-half, at 10. The new coach announced that his plan was to run the ball and if that failed they were to run the ball again.
Ireland, historically associated with grunt and passion for a century beforehand, suddenly transformed into 'Les Blues' and swept to another Triple Crown victory [no one spoke of 'winning the championship' in those days, though they did that as well].
The momentum couldn't be sustained and Ireland slumped to another wooden spoon in 1986 - the '85 success was sandwiched between two whitewashes, oddly enough. While the '87 Five Nations was better, Ireland placing second in the table on score difference - though that metric was only considered by pedants in those days - there was an increasing air of sourness between the coach and his squad.
"By the end, he [Doyle] was resentful of us for not winning games," wrote Willie Anderson in his autobiography. "We were making him look bad. Some of us were resentful of him for being resentful of us."
Doyler had been living fast for a long time up til then and was badly out of shape by the summer of '87.
With heady notions of using the trip to get fitter, he unwisely joined in with the backs in the first training session off the plane. It was all too much. At the dinner word filtered through that he had taken ill.
In fact, he had suffered a heart attack. Fortunately, he wasn't in any massive danger and the episode has been alternately referred to using the less alarmist term 'heart scare'. Nonetheless, he was confined to hospital for a few days, hooked up to wires.
A few senior players visited the hospital to see how he was bearing up. The atmosphere wasn't terribly solemn; Brian Spillane's first comment was to ask whether it was a boy or a girl.
Doyle's scare was a big story back home. It was a measure of the coach's fame and charisma that the Taoiseach called him up to offer his best wishes.
Haughey, notwithstanding his alleged passion for photobombing images of Irish sporting success, showed not the slightest interest in the sport of rugby union throughout a long political career. A big GAA and horse racing man, Charlie was on board the soccer bandwagon to a degree in 1988 and 1990; the rugby boys did not offer much potential for basking in reflected glory in the 1987-92 period.
Ireland's meeting with Wales in Wellington was the last of the first round of games. There was a nagging problem. For the inaugural World Cup, national anthems were to occupy a more central role in the pre-match pageantry. Prior to then, it was customary that only the home team's anthem would be played. Ireland stood for 'Amhrán na bhFiann' in Dublin but had no song away from home. [The Scots, incidentally, stood for 'God Save The Queen' until 1990, when they adopted Flower of Scotland.]
Lenihan and the others were disconcerted by the sight of the Fijians and the Samoans gripping their chest purposefully and belting out their respective anthems with tearful abandon. With anthems now played as a matter of course, Ireland would be the only nation at the World Cup without a pre-match song.
He consulted the Ulster duo of Anderson and Trevor Ringland on whether they'd be happy to stand for 'Amhrán na bhFiann' beforehand, with none of them having problem with it - a detail Anderson backs up in his own book.
However, the captain was met with a 'computer says no' style response from Syd Millar and the IRFU committee men. 'That's our policy, it's just the way it is," was the answer.
Following a late night meeting of players' reps and the blazers, a compromise was reached. Phil Orr had a cassette of 'James Last in concert' from Tralee 1984, where the German big band leader had placated the local audience by striking up 'The Rose of Tralee' at a certain point in the evening. Last, a bete noire of music critics, had found a particular fame in Ireland as the man behind The Sunday Game theme tune.
Sorted, they'd play that. Evidently jaded from their deliberations, they didn't bother listening to the tape.
The following day, the Irish team ran out in a windswept, rickety Athletic Park - now the site of a retirement home - and gathered together for a huddle in the middle where the anthems were played. As 'the pale moon was rising...' warbled faintly out of the speakers, the Irish players realised in horror that this was for them.
At home, the public reaction could hardly have been more outraged had they played the Billy Boys.
James Connolly's grandson James Connolly Heron was especially angry, describing it as "an appalling and extraordinary development for a sovereign nation, which has paid for its independence in blood, that a James Last recording of the Rose of Tralee should be thought sufficient replacement for the National Anthem."
He finished his scathing letter by expressing the hope that "'the lads' will get the results they deserve."
TV reviewer Seamus Martin said he had no major problem with the Rose of Tralee but had a significant problem with James Last's involvement.
Having been anxious to play something ahead of their first World Cup game, the players wisely decided that playing nothing was an infinitely superior alternative to the Rose of Tralee.
Despite the hasty ditching of their new anthem - we can only assume the tape in question was pegged into Wellington Harbour - the aftertaste was still rumbling on for a time afterwards.
Lenihan recounted in his autobiography that he was accosted in a pub in Mitchelstown after the Munster hurling final by a man of Republican sympathies who demanded with a snarl that he "sing the Rose of Tralee." It took Dr Con Murphy and Teddy McCarthy, both in the pub at the time, to defuse the situation.
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In the match, Wales gained revenge for their recent Five Nations loss to Ireland, winning 13-6. Francis, who was anxious to remind people he was on the bench, described it as "without parallel in the history of the game - universally chosen as the worst game of rugby union ever seen. Anyone who took part in it would pay a high price at the Webb Ellis pearly gates." Though, that grandiose claim has been made for many an Irish match back in the dog days.
Doyle risked another coronary with his post-match dressing room rant and by all accounts resentment deepened.
Ireland had to head for Dunedin - "a frightful kip" according to Francis - for their next game against Canada.
New Zealand's stock of stadiums didn't have much wow factor and the aesthetic of the tournament looks like an underage World Cup from the present perspective. From the TV coverage, they resembled an assortment of Antipodean Páirc Tailteanns.
As expected, the match yielded Ireland's first RWC victory, though the 46-19 scoreline was deeply misleading.
With 25 minutes remaining, a panicked Ireland trailed 19-16 and a humiliating loss was in the offing. Even with 10 minutes left, it was only 19-19 until Keith Crossan went over for his second try to settle the nerves and the floodgates finally opened. Damningly, the Canadians only played 70 minute matches back home.
Ireland found their groove a bit better against Tonga in the final pool game - a match which is available in full on Youtube for any obsessives or insomniacs - though they were helped by the comically inept decision to award Brendan Mullin a try in the first half when he clearly failed to ground.
They had to zip all the way over to Brisbane for this one. The match marked Francis' first cap for Ireland, Tony Ward's last and prop Job Langbroek's first and last. Ward, a breakthrough star in the late 70s, had famously played second fiddle to first Campbell and latterly Dean during the 1980s, and was a longstanding cause celebre in the media who struggled to fathom his continued omission - the Andy Reid of his era. 32-9 was the final score, Mullin and Hugo MacNeill together accounting for all five tries.
While scarcely impressive, Ireland had at least escaped the pool but now faced a daunting task against Australia in the last-eight.
The Wallabies, traditionally the weakest of the southern hemisphere powers, enjoyed a golden age in the 1980s and 1990s, boasting greats of the sport like David Campese, Mark Ella (though he'd retired abruptly in the mid-80s), Tim Horan and John Eales.
They had an exotic coach in the shape of Alan Jones, now more famous in his homeland as a right-wing talkshow host, the kind whose remarks "put pressure on sponsors" every couple of years.
It wasn't much of a match. The Aussies, smarting from the criticism from their unimpressive performance against Japan, blitzed Ireland in the first half and led 24-0 after 25 minutes. One of the Aussie try scorers was Brian Smith, who, in a bizarre set of circumstances wound up as Ireland's starting out-half in 1990-91.
Ireland made a heroic late burst for respectability, with MacNeill - who would finish the inaugural World Cup with four tries - and Kiernan going over late on to leave the final score at 33-15. With the game long won, the Australian defensive effort was token.
Doyler, who was already halfway out the door, unwisely announced that Ireland had "won the second half", a remark which didn't exactly scream 'High Performance Mentality' and invited a fair degree of ridicule.
in his post-match interview with Australian television, Lenihan said it had taken Ireland two games to get all of the travelling out of their system and that he was proud of the team for "having a cut" in the final hour.
Anderson, keen to see his provincial coach Jimmy Davidson take over, encouraged Doyle to call it a day in the departures lounge. "You've had three seasons, a good run of it. It's gone now," he recalled telling the Irish head coach in his book.
An imperious New Zealand wound up winning the tournament with some ease, defeating France in the final, the latter having shocked the Wallabies in a semi-final thriller.
Ireland' first World Cup showing had been fairly drab and unremarkable and the subsequent decade would be no picnic. It wasn't until the turn of the century that the national team started to pull up trees again but the World Cup remains their white whale.
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