By Cathal Dervan

Sometimes you just can’t win with kids, no matter how much love, attention or presents you lavish on them at this time of year.

I’m not speaking from personal experience right now, though I have been there and still have the t-shirt.

No, the fate that befell a fellow father as he walked out of Thomond Park in front of me on Saturday night got me thinking about kids and how sometimes they just don’t know how good life is.

I’m not going to deliver a “we used to walk to school in our bare feet and only ever got lumps of coal for Christmas” type lecture here because it wouldn’t be true. 

What I will say is that one of my great regrets in life is not getting to Dalymount Park in October 1974 when the Republic of Ireland hammered Russia 3-0 on Liam Brady’s international debut.

At the time I was just about 10 and a half and at an age where the half was very important. I had also, over the previous three years, developed a gra for association football thanks in part to Charlie George’s FA Cup final heroics in 1971 and also to Gerd Muller’s wonderful World Cup campaign the previous summer.

As a result I wanted to taste international football in the flesh for the first time that autumn but my father, uninterested in sport despite a huge Galway hurling family background, refused on the grounds of age — I was too young to be brought and he was too old to be interested.

It was a big game to miss. We were only talking about that on Monday night as the jury for the FAI Awards sat down to decide on Ireland’s player of the year for 2004.

And we agreed that the game, 30 years ago, was probably the dawn of famous Irish victories of the TV age, coincidentally the subject of a new RTE DVD in time for the Christmas market.

Anyway, back to Limerick. As we left the famous rugby ground after a most incredible night’s drama that culminated in a deserved win for Munster over a callous Castres, the young kid in front of me turned to his father.

“Daddy, what time is it?” asked the child of no more than seven or eight years of age, complete with Munster hat and scarf to keep him warm on a cold and rainy Limerick evening. (The rain wasn’t that bad by the way, but Frank McCourt might see this!)

The father replied, as fathers always do. “It’s half past eight,” he said only be with a shower of protest. 

“Ah dad, we’ve missed the final of the X Factor and I really wanted to see it, it’s not fair,” groaned Junior.

I nearly fell over with the laughter as the father tried to explain why Munster’s heroic Heineken Cup win, a result that gets them back on track for another quarterfinal place, was more important than any television program.

He even tried, God bless him, to explain that the X Factor, an American Idol-type show, was a manufactured television program designed to boost the careers not just of the teenagers it exploits, but also of our own Louis Walsh and Simon Cowell, the dreaded judges.

It was all to no avail. All the kid wanted to know was whether the boy band G4 had beaten someone called Steve in the big vote – they didn’t by the way, but hopefully we’ll never hear of either artist again.

The father was fighting a losing battle but he knows, as well as I did at the time, that in years to come that child will tell his friends he was there the night Ronan O’Gara broke the Heineken Cup scoring record.

It was, even if he failed to realize it at the time, a very special night in Thomond Park’s illustrious history.

Munster ran in five tries, drove the huge Castres pack all over the field and took every fist, boot and gouge that came their way in an ill-tempered game. 

It wasn’t pretty but it was everything that good rugby should be, a game played with the intensity of an international without the test caps that go with it.

The whole occasion had an X Factor all of its own – but that can be a hard theory to understand when you’re just eight years of age. In years to come the little boy from Limerick might just know what I mean.