On the surface, all seems hunky dory.
The Ireland men’s team are ranked third in the world, the ever-improving women’s side are ranked fifth and Leinster are one more home semi-final win away from becoming the first side ever to reach four successive Champions Cup finals.
Scratch underneath, though, and the gap between Leinster and the other three provinces has never been bigger, nor more alarming.
How to fix the Champions Cup?
For sure, there is nothing particularly new in Leinster being the last Irish team standing in Europe. They have been the only Irish team in the semi-final stages of the Champions Cup for six seasons in a row now, while Ulster haven’t been in a final for 13 years and Munster for 17 seasons.
However, it’s not just that the other three provinces are so far away from dining at European rugby’s top table, it’s that there is no sign of this changing any time soon.
Furthermore, take the URC, a competition which the Irish teams used to routinely dominate. Two seasons ago, Leinster, Ulster, Munster and Connacht all reached the playoffs. The latter three, on average, had a 61 per cent winning ratio that season.
This season, as things stand, Munster, Ulster and Connacht have all lost more matches than they have won. Between them, the trio’s winning ratio has dropped to 42 per cent. Munster sit seventh, Ulster 10th and Connacht 12th, and there is a real possibility that Leinster might be the only Irish team in the playoffs and hence the only Irish team in next season’s Champions Cup, with the other three consigned to the Challenge Cup.
It shouldn’t come to that. The others are still in the mix, but then again it might come to that. This cannot be solely attributable to the arrival of the South African teams. After all, they were there two seasons ago.
Throw in the provinces’ respective Champions Cup and Challenge Cup games this season and whereas Leinster’s winning ratio is 95 per cent, for the three others combined this figure is 45 per cent.
This is truly alarming. But then again this is the inevitable byproduct of the increasing centralisation of the Irish system and its focus on international teams, be they 15s or Sevens, during the tenure of David Nucifora as the IRFU performance director. And it could take many years to rectify the problem.
The IRFU invest equally in the pathways of all four provinces but they are not receiving much in return from Munster, Ulster and Connacht, although the Union’s focus on Provincial Talent Squads and National Talent Squads seems only to have shrunk the base designed to develop international quality players.
Next season there will be 14 centrally contracted players, of whom four came from the pathways in New Zealand (Bundee Aki, James Lowe and Jamison Gibson-Park) and Australia (Mack Hansen).
Connacht can rightly lay claim to Robbie Henshaw, but the other nine, including Munster’s only centrally contracted player, Tadhg Beirne, came through the Leinster pathway. Not one player came through Munster or Ulster, and the latter do not have one centrally contracted player next season.
Last week’s announcement by the IRFU that the provinces are to be responsible for 40 per cent of national player contracts where previously the figure had been set at 30 per cent is a step in the right direction. It is estimated that this will free up around €500-€600,000 for the IRFU to redistribute toward improving the pathways in Connacht, Munster and Ulster.
One sincerely hopes that these monies are used to upgrade the yawning gulf in facilities and coaching which exists between the elite rugby-playing schools in Leinster compared to the other three provinces. As well as having this and other socio-economic advantages, true to type Leinster were also quicker out of the blocks in breaking into their own schools.
As with the other provinces, schools rugby had been something of an impenetrable sacred cow, but teachers – under heightened pressure academically – don’t have the time for coaching which they once had. So, maybe the other three provinces should stop trying to emulate the Leinster system and focus their energies and player development on their clubs. For it’s hard to see how the Cork, Limerick, Galway and Belfast schools will ever match the facilities and coaching budgets of St Michael’s, Blackrock et al.
The IRFU have done many things right, eventually, in the professional era but in investing more heavily on Ireland international teams they have taken their eye off the provinces. And although Team Ireland should be strong for another few years yet, the chickens are already coming home to roost.
Remember the 90s? Team Ireland could hardly buy a win. That was partly because the same was true of all four provinces in the early days of professionalism and the European Cup.
Then came Ulster’s 1999 European Cup triumph and, in particular, Munster’s emergence in the noughties to reach four finals, winning two of them in 2006 and 2008. This was followed by Leinster’s arrival among European rugby’s true elite, which provided the players with the confidence to establish Ireland as one of the best sides in the world.
Viewed in that light, Leinster’s excellence should be celebrated. Where Irish rugby would be without them really doesn’t bear thinking about. That’s why the stellar signings of the last 12 months, and the IRFU sanctioning the arrival of Rieko Ioane, are positives. Leinster winning the Champions Cup would be brilliant for Irish rugby. Rather than close the gap by diluting Leinster in any way, the Union need to strengthen the other three.
The restructuring of the Union’s funding model last week is presumably with this ideal in mind and followed ‘a planned review of its funding model’. Hence it had been in the pipeline for a year or so, and it will take many years for it to bear fruit. The likelihood is that much of the investment in Under-20s and Sevens programmes will also be redirected towards the other three provinces.
But it is already clear that while this is a step in the right direction, it is most likely a drop in the ocean and not nearly enough to address the underlining and alarming fault lines which have emerged in Irish rugby.
