Gerry Thornley On Rugby

One imagines Elwood - a restless and animated spirit on the pitch - wouldn't be cut out for coaching. And being compelled to watch the club he has stayed loyal to for the best part of two decades trying to save their first-division lives, as they had to last Saturday, would have been altogether too frustrating for him.

That players still shed tears over their clubs, and would still actually want to play for their clubs, might surprise people, but Elwood would be far from unique.

Although John McWeeney, Emmet Byrne and Gavin Hickie were made available to St Mary's, the club were enraged when Victor Costello and Malcolm O'Kelly were unable to help their club in their hour of need. Indeed, both players had expressed their desire to do so to Gary Ella, and had intimated to the outgoing St Mary's coach, Brent Pope, they would be available, but after playing for the entirety of Leinster's inglorious 51-20 defeat to Llanelli on Friday night (likewise Lansdowne's Gordon D'Arcy and Shane Horgan) they weren't able to.

"Fair enough, rules are rules, and if they play for more than 40 minutes they're not eligible," said Pope, shrugging his shoulders, "but these guys are Mary's guys, they're friends of Mary's, they'll go up tonight and there'll be tears in the club.

"It's a sad day and these guys wanted to be part of that, they wanted to think they could save it."

Nor are these players necessarily veterans from a bygone age. In these pages recently the young Munster and Ireland lock Donncha O'Callaghan spoke passionately of his desire to appear for his club at least once or twice in the season, to repay the debt he feels he owes them.

But for how much longer will the system be producing players who retain ties with clubs? If the emphasis on the provincial game is maintained, and indeed the IRFU's deeply flawed, more localised club game comes to pass, in a decade or so it could well be no contracted player will retain even the remotest emotional or umbilical link with a club.

The process has, of course, already started, but it prompts the question: is this the breed of player the IRFU wants to produce? For the clubs, it should be their natural inclination to help players develop fully, but if they're going to effectively be punished for it, why bother?

To illustrate the point, Pope cited the examples of two clubs with two of the strongest feeder schools in the Leinster game, St Mary's and Terenure, who could field a side of contracted players good enough to compete in the European Cup, but such has been the drain to Leinster they are now both in the second division of the AIB League.

However, the first division mightn't yet be as hard to regain access to as those two clubs and others imagine. In response to the IRFU's ill-considered blueprint for the future of the club game, an alternative structure now being circularised and considered among the 48 clubs in all three divisions is a three-tiered divisional structure, with each division of 16 clubs divided into two groups or sections of eight.

These would play home and away, ensuring a minimum of 14 league games before the play-offs. It really is the existing format in different clothing, but the clubs' failure to address improving standards in the first division by, say, reducing the top two flights to a dozen teams each and then having a third tier divided into two regions (thereby making it a more meaningful stepping stone to provincial rugby) is hardly surprising.

Self-interest and limited ambitions rule. There are clubs out there who have lost their way in the professional era as much through their own poor husbandry as anything else, and see the IRFU's supposed return to provincial roots as a chance to level the playing field. At a stroke any club (even in the third division) could win the AIL title with an expensive one-year investment. How's that going to prevent the money bleeding out of the game or safeguard its long-term future?

Under their current proposals, the clubs have at least embraced the concept of two up and two down, albeit while only relegating one club from the third division.

Relegating two and promoting two from the junior ranks would make the league less of a closed shop, and also offer relegated clubs a better chance of a swift return.

Borrowing from the IRFU's module for revitalising the four provincial leagues, the clubs are also considering an All-Ireland Cup in which the provincial leagues would act as qualifiers; arriving at six clubs from Leinster, five from Munster, four from Ulster and two from Connacht. The clubs propose finding a separate sponsor for this competition and have set up committees to examine, one, AIL sponsorship and finances, two, the competition model, and, three, marketing the club game.

In all of this and much else, it's clear so much more could be done for the club game. Indeed, as the divisional play-offs loom, the thought occurs yet again the second and third division play-offs should carry the additional carrot of a second promotion place (the respective champions gaining automatic promotion and exemption from the play-offs).

Imagine the interest this would generate in the last few weeks of the season as clubs clamber for a top-five place, in the knowledge that promotion is still in the offing, not to mention for the semi-finals and finals themselves? But it seems a little more wit and imagination are required.