You can spend too much time following the Munsters and Leinsters. Scratch beneath the surface and you find a lot going on in the underworld of Irish club rugby — ridiculous sums of money reportedly being thrown at 19-year-olds for their signature, a legendary Welsh international turning up to coach at Old Crescent, Galwegians recruiting players from Newcastle Falcons, Sale Sharks and from right across the southern hemisphere.
All around the country, clubs have been mobilising themselves, not merely for the AIB League programme, which starts on Saturday, but also for dramatic changes that are not far away.
Tuesday should have been D-Day, with all 48 senior clubs due to vote on a bright and forward-thinking plan, devised by their own association (AISCRA), which retained all the best aspects of the league while reducing the size of the top division and therefore making it more relevant to the professional end of the sport.
The knee-jerk reaction of a few clubs in Munster scuppered the entire operation. There will be no vote on Tuesday, just a long season of discussion and argument. And when all that is done, the IRFU will have to make some hard decisions.
The union has credited itself with kick-starting the whole league debate two years ago. And indeed it did — by coming up with proposals that scared the living daylights out of the clubs. The union’s masterplan (which involved sexing up the good ol’ provincial leagues) succeeded in achieving what we never thought possible: unanimity among the clubs.
Not only did they put aside ancient enmities to form their umbrella group, they came up with an interim league format of three divisions of 16, which is in place until the end of next season.
Six weeks ago, they stunned us again. The AISCRA executive (six reps from Division One, four each from the lower two divisions) unanimously agreed that the top flight be cut to 10 clubs from 2007-08, with 19 clubs in each of the other divisions. It looked just about perfect. The numbers added up, with 18 league Saturdays across the board. Reducing the number of top-flight clubs would improve standards and provide a viable alternative to the growing programme of provincial ‘A’ games, which rob the clubs of their best young players.
But it was too good to be true. As soon as words such as “elite” and “premier” appeared in media reports, the second and third division clubs in Munster were reminded of resentments against Cork Con, Shannon and Garryowen that go back generations. If they are for it, by definition we must be agin it. Even though their AISCRA representatives had helped devise the new proposals, even though promotion and relegation were part of the deal, the cranks were having none of it. Back to square one.
Those men who put in the hours on the proposal must be desperately frustrated. We’re now into questionnaires — separate ones devised by each branch of the union for their various clubs. The Division One clubs can’t decide whether they want a league of eight or 10 or 12. Protecting your interests is taking precedence over the bigger picture. And it’s hard to see things changing by the end of the season, when decisions will have to be made.
Because the clubs will never agree, those decisions will have to be made by the union. Judging by the comments of director of rugby Eddie Wigglesworth, this might not be such a frightening prospect.
True, the union is committed to the idea of provincial ‘A’ games. As things stand, they are an irritant to club coaches, who have hardly seen or heard from their fringe provincial players since club training started in July or August (one of the main reasons yesterday’s friendly between Blackrock and Lansdowne was cancelled was because of Leinster’s ‘A’ game against the Waratahs this afternoon).
But Wigglesworth also knows that young pros and academy players need more than games against the kids they competed with in school, played at odd times before a handful of spectators. They need to learn how to win local derbies, how to survive before narky crowds in Clifford Park, how to deal with the 32-year-old prop who’s slower but also harder and cuter.
A smaller Division One is obviously essential for the league to service the professional game. Less obvious is the solution to maintaining a Division One presence in all four provinces. If there is promotion and relegation from the top flight, there is also the risk that after a while, you end up with a concentration of clubs from two provinces.
But Wigglesworth is committed to finding a formula where the league and the ‘A’ games can dovetail effectively. “There has to be a synergy between the AIB League and the professional game,” he says. “We need the A programme because it’s a vital part of the professional structure but equally we need the AIB League because that’s going to give the Academy players quality game time. It’s not a question of one or the other and that was never the case. We were misrepresented on that one.” And if the clubs come back at the end of the season with another version of the status quo, clearly an unsupportable situation, will the union take the bull by the horns? “That would be a big concern within the union, to be honest with you.”
“There is a need to curtail the number of sides in Division One and that could take place on a phased basis. It would have to take place with the agreement of all the clubs in the league but the union is obliged to provide a certain amount of leadership in this. And if the union felt that the best interests of Irish rugby were served by reducing the size of the first division, then I don’t think it would be found wanting in doing what has to be done.”
That sounds like a yes. In the meantime, as Wigglesworth says, there will be a lot of “robust debate” and quite a bit of rugby, too. As usual, there are doubts about Shannon’s ability to replicate last season’s stunt, when they scraped into the top four and then carried off yet another title.
Just as last season, they have lost quite a few influential players in key positions: fly-half Dave Delaney to Plymouth, open-side John O’Connor to Coventry, centre Brian Tuohy to Rotherham and Eoin Cahill, another centre, to Bruff. They will rely heavily on last year’s successful under-20s side. For all that, Paddy Power has installed Mick Galwey’s team as 9-4 favourites to win their eighth title — and that would give them 50% of the league titles since the AIL was formed in 1990.
It’s worth remembering that there was quite a bit of opposition to the idea of a national league throughout the 1980s. Eventually, the IRFU just made a decision and ran with it. Such leadership will soon be required again.
