Pick’n’mix

Anthem is as anthem does. What with the rugby internationals last weekend and the ongoing Commonwealth Games, a mad medley of various national anthems has been grating around the airwaves. Some find them uplifting. For me, the jingoistic jingles jar, particularly as extended overture to the rugby when the camera, with ingratiating reverence, pans along the line of cauliflower-eared shaven heads which resembles a Dickensian identity parade at Tilbury and a last call for Magwitches bound for the colonies. Some players weep, others prefer the trance-like glare.

What, or which, is a national anthem these days? At Melbourne it’s been ‘Scotland the Brave’; at the rugby ‘Flower of Scotland’, a bland country-and-western-isles-type trill. During the Troubles the all-Ireland rugby team spurned any pre-match anthem. Now in Dublin they serenade themselves with two official salutes, the Gaelic anthem and the breezy ‘Ireland’s Call’ (‘Together standing tall, shoulder to shoulder’), plus a blast of ‘Molly Malone’ and ‘Fields of Athenry’ should they need a buck-up during the game itself. All four were in evidence, not only at the Twickenham rugger on 18 March but at Cheltenham’s shamrock Gold Cup greenwash on St Paddy’s day. For the Commonwealth Games it is only Northern Ireland, of course, and its peerless ‘Londonderry Air’, and I must admit to twice being totally overwhelmed by an emotional ‘Danny Boy’ wallow — when Mary Peters of the melon smile won the pentathlon at Christchurch in 1974 and lightweight leprechaun Barry McGuigan the boxing four years later at Edmonton.

The English have revved up a rousing ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ at the Commonwealth, but it is ‘God Save the Queen’ for the rugby. Former army officer Will Carling always wanted a change to ‘I vow to thee, my country’.