FROM THE BLINDSIDE: Having endured a tough decade, the club game is on the up again, with economic hard times having helped reminded us how important it is
A COUPLE of weeks ago, when nearly 3,000 people turned up at Thomond Park on a Friday night, it wasn’t for a Rabo Pro 12 game. There were a few of the Munster squad playing alright but that wasn’t what brought people in through the gates. No, for the first time in a long time, the pulling power came from the club game – it was Shannon v Young Munster in the Ulster Bank League and the people who paid through the turnstiles ended up seeing a classic. Young Munster came back from 20-3 down after half an hour to win 23-20 and everyone went home knowing they’d witnessed a cracking game.
To see that many people heading out on a Friday night to go to a league game would do your heart good. Or at least it would do my heart good. I was a club player before I was anything else. I didn’t come through the schools system, I came through first with Clanwilliam and later with Shannon and in fact the first All-Ireland League game I ever played was against Munsters up in Greenfields.
It’s what I grew up with. My dad used to bring me to games in Limerick when I was a boy. Then later on when I was playing with Clanwilliam, I used to work every second Saturday in a garage for a half-day. Whenever I could get away, I’d take my mam’s car and head off to a game with a few friends. To end up playing in the league itself was a huge thrill for me. It might sound a bit stupid now but to me at the time, it was like a kid who loved soccer getting a game in the Premier League.
Back at the end of the 1990s, the clubs were where your loyalties lay. You played in front of huge crowds in tough, physical games. They were your bread and butter, they hardened you up and got you noticed. Even though you might be playing for Munster in the Heineken Cup, there was still a good chance that an Ireland selector would see you playing an AIL game.
In a way, it wasn’t the Heineken Cup that really killed the club game. It was the Celtic League. When it arrived, it changed what our bread and butter would be. It meant that provincial players had to come together and play and train as one unit. The attitude in the clubs at the time was that they could nearly live with losing players for a few weekends a year to go and play in the interpros and the Heineken Cup but they knew when the Celtic League came that we would be gone.
The professional game needed professional players living and breathing the game full-time and doing it together. The level of play wasn’t doing anyone any harm but it was fairly obvious that for us to improve and compete, we had to leave the clubs behind and work under one umbrella. We all know now that it worked out well for just about everyone in Irish rugby. But the clubs got left behind.
It was hard for players to do that, to leave behind the ties and loyalties they’d built up. For a while, we were half-in and half-out. It caused turmoil because the provincial players would all be released back to the clubs for specific weekends and in a place like Shannon, that could be anything up to seven or eight guys coming back. So fellas who had been playing in every game got put to one side when we came back and there was definitely some resentment.
Eventually, it became unsustainable and a lot of clubs decided they couldn’t guarantee provincial players games when they came back.
But just because we were playing together for Munster, it didn’t mean we weren’t still club men at heart. The truth of it is that we would have found it hard to come together in some cases. Once the red jersey was on everybody would play for each other but it wouldn’t always be like that in training or when we were travelling to matches. It might be Shannon lads in one corner and Garryowen guys in the other and the Cookies in the other. Cork Con lads, sure you wouldn’t know where they’d be.
I remember Dave Mahedy was the poor unfortunate whose job it was to get us to train together back then and God love him, he had a job on his hands to get us on the same page. It wouldn’t have been uncommon to see the Shannon guys doing their weights together while the Garryowen lads went outside to do their speed session. That rivalry was still there even as late as 1998-99 and it took a while for fellas to fully accept each other as the people they would be working with every day. It sounds like madness now but that’s how strong your link to your club was.
Once the Celtic League came along, Declan Kidney and Niall O’Donovan sat us down and said it had to stop. This was what we’d all signed up to, this was what being professional rugby players was all about, this was what we all wanted to do with our lives. The clubs had helped us all hugely but we were Munster players now and we had to let go. It was hard on the clubs but it had to be done.
The crowds at club matches were always going to go down. Not only were the best-known players not there any more but there were bigger games to go to in the Celtic League and the Heineken Cup. In the end, people can only do so much with their time and their money.
On the pitch, the distance between the club game and the professional game grew. Initially, it was a physical thing but as time went by, the difference was more in the skills. Club players today are rarely significantly less impressive physical specimens than provincial players. Trust me, I know all about it – the last time I played a club game was in 2008 when I was coming back from a thumb injury and got some gametime for Shannon against Galwegians in Coona. They beat the s**t out of me. Ivan Muldoon, brother of the Connacht player John, was playing in the backrow for them and he was all over me. Never mind the decade of strength and conditioning I’d put in as a professional, a strong guy is a strong guy and the club game is full of them.
The last game I had before that was in 2006, again when I was coming back from injury and trying to get some fitness for the Heineken Cup final. What happened that day wasn’t fair – I took the place of a Shannon player, Anton Meaney, for the league final. I came on for the last 30 minutes but felt like a fraud the whole day, especially when all the lads were dancing around the place at the end.
Anton had been there all season and had played and trained away and here I was swanning in and taking his place. It wasn’t right but it’s what had to be done at the time. I gave Anton the medal afterwards. I’d done nothing to deserve it.
The clubs are always going to be used as a place where players coming back from injuries can get a game or two to regain match fitness. But I still believe there is a route from the club game to the provincial side of things. James Coughlan is proof of that. The system won’t grab everybody when they’re a teenager and get them into the academies and the club game is still a place where a guy who for whatever reason has slipped the net at 18 or 19 can get himself noticed at 22 or 23. That’s not too late to fight your way into the professional game.
Overall though, the club game is predominantly a place for guys who love playing rugby to keep going and keep playing to a reasonably high level.
There’s no point pretending that there are loads of James Coughlans out there but that’s not the point of the league. As the game gets bigger and playing numbers grow, the Ulster Bank League is the outlet for the huge majority of good players in the country who will never make it to the professional game.
The standard is decent and there’s no doubt that a bit of excitement is definitely coming back to the league. People have less money to be going away on all the trips with their provinces and some of them are choosing to keep it local and reconnect with their clubs.
Former professionals like Mike Prendergast at Young Munster and Stephen Keogh at Shannon are coming back to the game and passing on what they’ve learned over the course of their careers. That creates a buzz and gets people interested again.
In an odd kind of way, I think more players are staying involved because of the recession. During the good times, you would have often seen very good club players just walk away from the game if they got to 21 but hadn’t been picked up at provincial level. They’d go off and throw themselves into whatever career they had and they’d drift away from the club altogether.
But these days, because there isn’t as much work or money around, the club is there as a social outlet for them. Something like that becomes far more important when times are hard.
The clubs have come through a very hard time over the past dozen years or so. They had every reason to feel left behind as the professional game became so popular and everybody latched on to the success of the provinces.
But I think once everybody stopped worrying about its popularity dwindling and just accepted it for what it is rather than beating it up for not being what it used to be, that’s when it started to turn around again.
We’ll never go back to the days of the mid- to late-’90s again. But as the crowd in Thomond Park a fortnight ago showed, that doesn’t mean we can’t enjoy these times just as well.
FROM THE BLINDSIDE
