An hour before kick-off, and I’m beginning to wonder if watching the first Test at Ballymena RFC was such a bright idea. It’s only me and the girl working the bar, and she doesn’t have a strong opinion on whether or not Tom Curry should be playing No 7. “Which paper did you say you were with, the Ballymena Guardian?” No, it’s the other Guardian, I say. “Oh, the Antrim one.”
Just about the time I was beginning to think that all of Ballymena’s thousand-or-so members must have been among the tens of thousands going the other way into Portrush for the Open, they began to trickle in, one, two, three, four dozen, and more.
