AFTER a two-year hiatus, the hybrid is back. Or maybe we should call it a mongrel instead. The Irish tourists have arrived in Perth, hoping to restore battered pride (on the scoreboard) while offering up a few private novenas that the onward flight to Melbourne isn't weighed down with too many battered bodies, either.

Yes, folks, International Rules is back in business. The beast is about to be unleashed once more. Coming to a cinema near you. For two nights only (or mornings, if you're left here in the damp, dreary home place). For now, the censor has given it an 18 Cert, despite a variety of X-rated tackles that blighted the past two ill-starred series of 2005 and 2006.

"A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE" screamed one headline last Monday morning -- just to maintain the movie motif, with the unwritten message to lock up your children for the next fortnight.

Will you watch it? Do you care? Are you appalled by all this testosterone-fuelled machismo that so often descends into wanton violence? Or, hand on heart, is that veiled promise of anarchy the only reason you'll sit down in front of your television this Friday morning?

Maybe -- like many GAA fans, we suspect -- you remain ambivalent about the whole 'arranged' marriage. Since the series was revived in 1998, you have probably enjoyed the (all-too-few) tests that have combined the best attributes of both codes while remaining competitively close on the scoreboard.

Doubtless, you have bemoaned Ireland's tactical naivety and, even more so, their chronic inability to kick that size-five O'Neill over the black spot during the most recent landslide defeats in '05 and '06.

If the Aussies have already mastered the alien round ball, so the merchants of doom proclaim, what does that say about Gaelic football's sad descent into a game of pseudo-handball?

But lamentations about standards pale into insignificance when the only real show in town is the violence -- or even the promise thereof. That is what threatened to kill off the series in 2005. That is what left the entire experiment on life-support after 2006.

Cynics will argue that once the big chiefs in the GAA and AFL agreed to knock heads together (metaphorically, of course!), the series was always likely to be given a stay of execution.

After all, the accountants could cite 82,127 very good reasons for its revival -- that was the Croke Park attendance for the last infamous test in November '06. Never mind if thousands were the probable recipients of complimentary tickets, they still bothered to turn up. And be turned off by what transpired.

That was the day Graham Geraghty was knocked unconscious -- the defining image of a day besmirched by wholesale eruptions of brawling. The original tackle from Danyle Pearce may have been legitimate under rule but the follow-up movement -- where Geraghty was slung to the ground -- patently wasn't as his head crashed against the turf. Sean Boylan -- a manager who seldom let the guard down during his 20-plus years with Meath -- was incandescent with anger afterwards.

This reporter has never witnessed a press conference like it, before or since. It happened in the then-spanking new media room under the Hogan Stand -- and for the entire 2007 season, we can't remember one occasion where it was actually utilised after a GAA match. We can only surmise the authorities feared it was haunted by the ghosts of that inaugural outing.

Among Boylan's many charges was the accusation that Geraghty had been deliberately targeted because of an incident during the previous test at Pearse Stadium, which led to the Meath veteran being cited but cleared.

Australian protestations of innocence weren't helped by the midweek pronouncements of their player, Lindsay Gilbee, who had predicted that Geraghty would "get his own next match". With the benefit of 20-20 hindsight, it sounds chilling; irony of ironies, Gilbee didn't even play after he was injured in the warm-up.

Mention of Gilbee brings us onto another bone of contention, namely the undiplomatic language of International Rules. Bad enough that players trade punches (which the Aussies don't particularly mind) or kicks (which they deem the most cowardly act of all) but trading insults is almost par-for-the-course when it comes to these tours.

Gilbee introduced the Irish audience to an entirely new phrase when he declared, apropos Geraghty, that it would be "open slather this week". We hadn't a clue what it meant -- and yet we grasped the meaning intuitively.

Truth be told, 'open slather' sounds almost innocuous compared to some of the invective uttered by International Rules participants and penned by newspapers.

It's a long time (22 years, to be precise) since Australian coach John Todd accused the Irish of being "a bunch of wimps" -- a strange choice of words when you consider some of the hardy bucks on Kevin Heffernan's panel, which had the last laugh when winning the '86 series.

Many years later, another Irish tourist was on the wrong end of a similar accusation -- and all because he was the victim of an unprovoked attack when entering the field as an inter-change player.

"I was so unaware that it was going to happen that I didn't even defend myself," the Rules veteran recalled this week. "Then I figured he was going to hit me, so I braced myself for a shoulder. But instead, he got his hand around the back of my neck, pushed my head down and then dropped five punches -- each one landed right on my nose. I had two black eyes, a broken nose and was spitting blood."

His assailant ended up with a three-match ban but, for the Irish player, insult soon followed injury via the Australian media.

"Literally, there were poems in the paper about the 'big Irish cissy, stop whingeing, this is the way the game is played,'" he remembers.

There were camera men at the airport, waiting after a round of golf, and it all felt very intrusive: "It just all went a bit crazy -- you don't really put yourself in for that."

Any neutral observer of the past two controversy-marred series would conclude that Australia were the chief perpetrators. In response, though, the Irish have shown their innate facility for climbing upon the high moral ground, with sweeping denunciations -- not just of the violence, but of Australia's entire sporting psyche.

Thus, in 2005, on the morning after Chris Johnston briefly went berserk during a spiteful second test in Melbourne, the banner-page headline in one newspaper was "Thugs ... 2, Ireland ... 0". On the inside pages, other headlines noted how Irish lives had been "at risk" after a "sickening orgy of gratuitous violence". And no, it wasn't the Sun!

Three days later, by the way, the same newspaper carried the following headline: "Mother watches in horror as boy (15) struck on head."

The same teenager, playing in the Laois senior hurling final, had been knocked unconscious after being struck on the head by an opponent's hurl ... proof that "sickening violence" is not an alien concept to these shores either.

vicious

Back in '05, Chris Johnston deserved all the opprobrium that followed his vicious clothes-line 'tackle' on Philip Jordan, with a follow-up assault on two more Irish players for good measure. But even now, three years on, his antics have not been forgotten with one columnist suggesting (in a novel twist on this blood-and-gore theme) that Australia's then co-captain brought "all the class of a menstrual orangutan" to the demolition of Ireland that year.

Mind you, the Aussies are well able to dish it out too. In one of the lighter moments from that incendiary '06 press conference, Australian coach Kevin Sheedy concluded by saying: "Every time Australia wins, the series is coming to an end. Unbelievable! You're the greatest conmen I've ever met."

Only this week, Sheedy's acid tongue was at it again. Writing for the Sunday Herald Sun, he claimed that Boylan had "ranted and raved" for an hour after the game, that he "almost fell asleep waiting for my turn" and that it was "the first time I thought I had met a leprechaun".

As cheap shots go, this bordered on infantile. But it wasn't the first and it won't be the last in a series where almost anything goes.

As one man wisely declared: "It's all fun and games until someone loses an eye."

- Frank Roche