There's a growing trend which is blighting life in Ireland in the 21st century.
We speak, of course, about the practise of people constantly comparing rugby and soccer while watching one of the two sports.
It has fallen on us to shout stop.
Now, we don't wish to take sides in this debate. We regard ourselves as honest brokers. However, it must be said, that in field of comparing one sport unfavourably with the other, rugby fans are worse.
Yesterday witnessed a veritable festival of such behaviour, which really began in earnest when the Poland-Ireland match kicked off.
A female acquaintance of mine spent the entirety of the Poland match lamenting what she appeared to regard as the excessive displays of metrosexuality on show.
The diving, in particular, raised her hackles and she was quick to broadcast the view that these lads 'wouldn't last a second in the rugby'.
To which the only sensible response is to point out that Mike Ross might struggle to keep the shackles on Lewandowski (*insert comment about him 'hardly doing any worse than O'Shea and Keogh' here).
Many others complained about what they said was the relative slowness of the soccer match, and about how there wasn't as much action and scores - in spite of the fact that there was more goals in Warsaw than there were tries in Cardiff. The money earned by the footballers was a constant refrain. All very tedious.
One wonders whether such attitudes were de rigeur back in 1990, a year in which the Irish football team reached the quarter-final of the World Cup and the Irish rugby team lost 23-0 in Twickenham. The suspicion here is that they weren't.
The jabs that soccer fans take at rugby have a different feel. In the main, they are born more out of spirit of contrarianism and a disdain for the bandwagon. One can imagine these were the same people lamenting the quality of football in the Charlton era. It's no surprise that League of Ireland fans and op-ed columnists (contrarian sorts) are prominent among the soccer loving rugby haters.
As of 2015, rugby fans slagging off soccer is definitely the more mainstream activity in this country. We are confident that this phenomenon would not survive a radical improvement in the fortunes of the Irish football team nor a sharp decline in the fortunes of their rugby brethren.
Before the pendulum swings back the other way, let's call a halt.
