Another week of Champions Cup means another week without the United Rugby Championship (URC). It has been like that this season, a run of URC matches before some other competition barges in and takes over for a few weeks.
The URC is like the connective tissue of the rugby season, joining everything else together. It is far flung and ubiquitous, filling in weeks between autumn internationals, the Six Nations and the Champions Cup.
It is cobbled together and fitted in here, there and everywhere. It should really come to us each season with a set of Allen keys.
It starts towards the end of September, the evenings still warm and bright, knowing only too well that the November international series will arrive like a juggernaut with its heavyweight Test match teams from across the globe and grab the world of rugby by its lapels.
Then the URC will shrink back until the shadows of the Springboks, All Blacks, Pumas and Wallabies magisterially move on, and the URC again has some light and some breathing space.
This season, it began on September 20th and built up a head of steam over six rounds of matches until the end of October. The November internationals arrived with New Zealand taking on Ireland in the first match. Nothing much bigger. Argentina followed before Fiji brought the volume down a notch. Still, 51,700 filed into the Aviva Stadium, Dublin, to watch.
Australia ended the series on the same weekend the URC resumed at the end of November. Just for one weekend, mind, as the beginning of the Champions Cup elbowed its way into the schedule for two weeks. As we like to say in the business, the aristocrats of Europe began to play.
Christmas is always lit up with the home URC derby games in Ireland, so we were again gifted two weeks of festive rugby with the collegiality of Ireland’s Call in November briefly forgotten in the testy interprovincial series. That was before the aristocrats reappeared in January for Champions Cup rounds three and four.
The URC is like the ignored child grabbing opportunity wherever it can find it. Between October 25th last year and February 14th just six rounds of URC matches were played, some of the clubs fielding their B teams and occasionally, with Leinster, their C team.
Of course, we all know what’s just around the corner in February with the hype and high energy of the Six Nations drawing every litre of oxygen from the rugby room. It is the cash cow of the season, the competition that underwrites almost all else.
Everything bows down to the Six Nations set piece that this year ran over five weekends between the end of January and St Patrick’s weekend in March.
Unperturbed by the wrestling giants, the URC managed to fire off two rounds when most were more concerned with stuttering Ireland and with France growing stronger game by game.
Obviously, shorn of many of the international players, just 12 rounds of URC matches were completed as February turned to March.
That’s deft footwork from the URC ducking and diving and leaving small footprints around the place, but keeping the show moving forward.
And here we are now in springy April with two weeks of Champions Cup knock-out matches to whet the appetite, the URC politely stepping aside again before it resumes with episode 15 on April 18th.
Disconnected, a mishmash of weekends in a mosaic of a rugby season? Yes, it’s a competition with little or no jeopardy in which teams often turn out without their recognised international players and in Ireland occasionally reach into the All-Ireland League.
Yes, Clontarf prop Ivan Soroka, a financial adviser with AIB Bank, returned to professional rugby with Leinster in February for the first time since spending a year with Connacht in the 2016-17 season.
Yet, look at the URC numbers. In another staggered season, it has lurched along while breaking attendance records. In February it announced that more than one million fans had turned up to games in just 11 rounds, which was the fastest pace ever for the league to break that attendance barrier.
That benchmark arrived just days after the single-round attendance record was set for the fourth time in little over a year with confirmation that more than 160,780 fans turned up across round nine fixtures, while a record 27,580 turned out for Connacht’s home game against Munster in MacHale Park, Castlebar, last weekend.
And it’s not just Irish teams that are drawing interest. The derby between Edinburgh and Glasgow Warriors drew 40,063 fans, with the Stormers match against Sharks packing in 46,002. Attendances across the board were up 14 per cent on last season and 20 per cent on the season before that.
It is a reminder of the myth about the team of aeronautical engineers who proved the humble bumble bee could not fly because it appeared ungainly with little wings and was designed without any aerodynamic consideration.
The URC calendar might appear disjointed and shaped by events around it. But it works and it flies. That is all that really matters.
