‘Ladyboys’ roused to devour the gods of our imaginations

In an ideal world, you’d think Saturday would mark the decommissioning of cliche. You’d hope it would deposit a stark, bailiff’s squiggle under the little, satirical jibes we so enjoy at Leinster’s expense.

After all, they roughed up just about everything we mistook for knowledge in Croke Park. It was like seeing Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen cut loose with a chainsaw.

See, we still can’t really help ourselves.

As evening bled into night across Dublin, it was quite something to sweep down towards O’Connell Street, this strange blue army tramping in a blur of Chinos and dockers and Ugg boots.

Odd, plummy voices pierced the air with cries of revolution, people who wouldn’t ordinarily get vexed in the presence of a burglar now marching with chests expanded like great bay windows.

“I hope the Pacific is as blue as it has been in my dreams,” says Andy Dufresne in ‘The Shawshank Redemption’. Now Leinster know it is, Andy. First time you see it, it’s bluer than a field of cornflowers.

What did Saturday tell us? Maybe that even the most lampooned and put-upon creature eventually locates a temper. The much derided ‘ladyboys‘ devoured a side we had, in our imaginations, put up somewhere with the gods.

In our understanding, Munster, you see, stood for everything that was real and identifiably heroic in rugby. Leinster amounted to a grandiose conceit. We just gathered to watch nature do its cull.