Hyperbole stalks the land.

There is talk of civil war.

Unborn generations are being invoked as the benefactors or debtors of what will unfold.

No conversation, no broadcast, no newsprint is safe from the hype machine. It is, to batter a cliche, a time to stand up and be counted.

We refer to today's game of rugby football involving the provinces of Leinster and Munster.

Wait! Don't leave the column yet.

This is not about sport. It's much more important than that.

To the winner of today's gladiatorial clash goes a place in the final of the European Cup, better known as the Heineken Cup. But the game is about primal repositories rather than passage to some mickey mouse final. It's about pride. It's about a way of life. It's about us and them. It stretches all the way back to those who took the soup and those who refused to yield.

There are two great dangers surrounding today's game. One is to exaggerate its significance. The other is to retreat into stereotypes when assessing the character of the respective provinces. This column pledges to gird itself against falling into either spurious pit.

The Leinster fan, better known as The Ladyboy, is a waste of space. This is no reflection on the geographic patch that encompasses the province, for the Ladyboy is exclusively drawn from the south of city and county Dublin. She attended one of the male-only fee-paying schools therein. She talks through her nose as if, perchance, there is something unpleasant lodged in her rear passage. She is a boorish bore.

She is Ross O'Carroll Kelly without the foibles and frailties that render Ross human. She is heard before she is seen, and when she does hover into view, she invariably sports a school scarf, worn like those RAF fighter pilot chaps.

She is a rugby fan because the game is good for a few scoops with the guys in the clubhouse. She thinks Drico is a fine role model and that bird of his isn't half bad either.

The Ladyboy has a tolerance for ?footie" since ?Jacko's" Boys in Green came along, but she recoils from either of the bogger codes of GAA.

To top it all, her genes are suspect. When the land was ravaged and the crown forces offered bribes to those who would help the king's cause, the Ladyboy's people were first in the queue. They took the soup.

By contrast, the Munster follower . . . the term ?fan" doesn't do him justice . . . is a paragon of the stoic Gael. He is manly, moderate in habits, heroic, chivalrous, generous of spirit and brimming with integrity. His idea of intoxication is to breathe in the air that inhabits the nether regions of Paul O'Connell's left armpit. He didn't play much in his day, but he could bore for Ireland on the subject of his passion for Munster.

He is a sporting ecumenicist, having a particular fondness for hurling, the only other game to sufficiently represent the fusion of manliness and tribal instincts that light his fire. His womenfolk know their rugby, and offer opinions that are parsed and respected. They are not in attendance for window dressing, as could be said of the coiffured trophies who accompany the soup-guzzling Ladyboy to Leinster matches. Munster, in the true spirit of the Republic, is an equal opportunities rugby family.

But don't think that he is soft as a result. Fear not for his fortitude. His people resisted when the soup was being ladled out.

He looks ahead to today's game with equal dollops of excitement and trepidation.

To win would be to assert in stone that which his heart instinctively knows . . . that the Munster Gael is a superior being to the shallow Ladyboy.

To lose, however, would be to succumb to a fate worse than life without soup. The horror, the horror.

So beware this afternoon, for there will be an almighty rumble in the Dublin 4 jungle.

It will be seismic. It will be awesome.

There can be only one winner, but be assured of a single truth. It will be a game of two bores.