Irish rugby has made a roaring success of the professional era

Rugby Union went open, permitting professionalism, after the 1995 World Cup. If you had suggested then that in 2018 Ireland would be ranked number two in the world, the response would have been sceptical: “aye, right” or “pull the other one”. But that’s how it is now. First, New Zealand, second Ireland. How come?

Of course there have always been great Irish players – Jack Kyle, Tony O’Reilly, Tom Kiernan, Mike Gibson, Ollie Campbell, Brendan Mullin among the backs,  Ronnie Kavanagh, Ray McLoughlin, Willie John McBride, the ferociously garrulous Fergus Slattery and Willie Duggan among the forwards. But there was very rarely a great Irish team, and often not even a good one.

There was reason for this. It wasn’t a popular sport. Indeed for a long time it was frowned upon, and not only because, like its cricket counterpart, the Irish Rugby Union paid no heed to the Border between the Unionist North and the Republic. Rugby was classed as “an Ascendancy sport”, and it drew from a fairly narrow social range. Rugby was West British in the eyes of the dominant Fianna Fail.

Like everywhere else the game was amateur, strictly amateur, I think. I doubt if there was any “boot money” in Irish rugby. You might say it was not only amateur, but often amateurish. The Ireland XV were rarely as fit as their opponents, even at a time when few were as fit as professional – and indeed amateur – players are now. You could usually reckon that if you were level with Ireland after an hour, the game was yours because the Irish players would be blowing hard by then.

I have a happy memory of seeing Willie Duggan when he was Ireland’s captain strolling about Murrayfield shortly before kick-off and puffing away at a succession of cigarettes. Of course lots of rugby players and other athletes smoked then. The great French full-back Serge Blanco was reputed to be a 40 Gitanes a day man, while David Johnston, speedy outside centre in Scotland’s 1984 Grand Slam winning side, was so rarely seen without a cigarette that he was known as “the Flying Ashtray”. Still, Duggan’s nonchalant, or perhaps nerves-calming, smoking that day, seems in memory characteristic of Irish rugby then.

So how do once happy-go-lucky Ireland come to be the second best team in the world? The short answer is that only New Zealand have handled the transition to professionalism better than Ireland. It took longer in Ireland, because they were starting from a  lower base, but they are now up there, nudging the All Blacks.

England and France are naturally the two strongest rugby countries in the northern hemisphere, so much so that some fifteen years ago it was suggested that they should always meet on the last afternoon of the Six Nations because their match was likely to be the decider. Their superiority was almost taken for granted: they were the richest Unions and they had the biggest pool of players to draw on; and when both reached finals of the World Cup, with England winning it in 2003, they were confirmed as the Big Beasts of European rugby.

However, professional rugby in both England and France was based on the clubs. A player’s first contract was with his club, not the national Union. The club was his prime employer. So there was from the start a tension between the demands of club and country. Clubs have rich owners, most of whom pay heavily for the pleasure and privilege of owning a top-flight rugby club. One suspects that some owners would be quite happy to see the international game and the Six Nations play  a poor second fiddle to club rugby just as, in England, international football does to the Premier League.

This isn’t likely to happen soon – though it may some day – because the RFU makes a great deal of money while almost all the clubs in the rugby Premiership lose millions every year. Still one consequence of the simmering rivalry between club and country is that, outside the official international blocks as regulated by the IRB (International Rugby Board),the clubs have control of their players. The England coach, Eddie Jones, may think that  Owen Farrell and Maro Itoje could do with a couple of weeks rest before or after the Autumn Internationals or the Six Nations, but he can’t order Saracens not to play them. He can ask of course, but the answer may well be short and to the point, the second word being “off”.

They manage things differently in Ireland. The four Provinces – Leinster, Munster, Ulster and Connacht – have a good deal of autonomy, but international players are contracted to the Union which monitors their work-load and can – and often does – decide to make them unavailable to their provincial side. Coaches of Leinster, Munster etc might like to have more freedom in managing their stars’ workload, but they accept the position. They do so because in Irish rugby now everything is geared towards the success of the national side. Consequently the Irish coach, Joe Schmidt, has far more power – in the sense of control – than England’s Eddie Jones. Jones may talk a good game. Schmidt has the freedom to run a better one.

Of course there’s more to it than this. Success has made rugby much more popular throughout Ireland. It has become a truly national sport at last. The number playing has increased hugely. Each of the provinces now runs a very professional academy. I have been impressed, even astonished, when watching the Guinness Pro 14 to see the quality of young players getting their chance in the provincial sides either during the Six Nations weeks or when Schmidt has withdrawn some of his stars from the club game.

Which brings me to the final irony which will be evident this weekend. A few years ago English and French clubs were dissatisfied with the arrangements for the European club competition, then known as the Heineken Cup, now as the European Champions Cup. The structure was unfairly biased, they said, in favour of clubs in what was then the Pro 12 -the Irish-Welsh-Scottish-Italian league- in which there was no relegation and teams qualified for the European Cup automatically or almost automatically. So the structure was rejigged in accordance with the wishes of English and French clubs, satisfactorily, one must say, for the English, since Saracens won the Cup in 2016 and 2017.

This year however there is no English club in the semi-final where Leinster play Scarlets (from Wales) and Racing 92 (from Paris) play Munster. So there may be an all-Irish final – to be played – remember it’s a European Cup – in Bilboa.

This provokes the thought: could it be that Central Control by the Union, with the national coach saying “play “ and he playeth, or “rest” and he resteth, makes the clubs, as well as the national side, stronger? The planned economy or the free market? Ireland have opted for the former –  and look where they are.