[su_dropcap style=”flat”]T[/su_dropcap]here’s an ad on Irish TV that has been on for well over a year now. You’ve probably seen it. If you’re outside of Ireland, you can have a look at it here.
It’s for the GAA Allianz League and works off a motif of life being a balance between courage and fear. It’s a really well-done ad, don’t get me wrong, but it always makes me laugh whenever I see it. It isn’t the over the top Lad From The Country™ voiceover guy hamming up the not-Dublin accent to convey authenticity, it’s the idea that the ad is basically telling you to have the Courage to Please Buy Tickets To, Or At The Very Least Be Interested In, The League Games.
Traditionally, that has been difficult for the average GAA supporter in Ireland.
The All-Ireland is where it’s at. Championship. For many, the league is for working out the kinks so you’re ready for the Championship and, in that regard, it’s automatically less important.
In this regard, I think the rugby audience and GAA audience have quite a large crossover which shouldn’t be too much of a surprise because, for the most part, they are the same people. Every rugby fan I know personally – bar one – is also a GAA supporter (and a soccer supporter). Cork football, for example, were in a relegation playoff at the weekend and, maybe I missed it, but it didn’t really cause a massive kerfuffle down in Cork. Keep in mind that I’m as casual as it gets with GAA but that football game at the weekend against Westmeath just didn’t show up on my radar.
Now if Cork were to lose in the first round of the Championship – that would be important.
This kind of thinking bleeds into rugby too. In the 2000s, the Heineken Cup was where it was at. The be-all and end-all. The Celtic and Magners League was, well, the League. The real games were in the European Cup and that’s just how it was for that decade with a few outliers every few years. That perception has changed slightly over the last decade and in the last five years specifically but the perception of the PRO14 as being The League has hurt it as a product. The format and name changes didn’t help, to be fair, but if I was to pick one area where it consistently fell down from a perception perspective, it was the number of games played during test windows.
Last season, 10 rounds of the PRO14 were played in and around test windows in November and early Spring. That’s a total of 50 points up for grabs where teams without the depth of the Irish provinces – all of them – were at a distinct disadvantage. You might say that was a knock-on of the disrupted calendar due to COVID but in the 2018/19 season, it was the exact same number of rounds that were directly affected by test windows.
That creates a situation where heavily rotated Irish sides are, for the most part, sticking bonus point beatings on unrecognisable Scottish, Welsh and Italian teams featuring players who don’t even have profile photos on their own club website.
Now if you’re reading this, chances are you’re probably a hardcore rugby fan so those test window games were interesting because of the young talent getting a break in the squad next to your veterans, your guys outside of test consideration, your fellas on the fringes of the international squad getting minutes and whatever NIQ signings you had available to you.
The casual fan, however, just sees a game that doesn’t really mean anything being played by guys they don’t really recognize. They might watch it if it was on, but they probably aren’t paying to go in the gate for that because the test games on that weekend are The Main Event and are perceived as such.
The United Rugby Championship changes that.
By confirming an 18 round regular season – with 33% of those being home and away interpros – the URC has moved the vast majority of the games away from test rugby. What does that do? It gives the non-Irish sides a chance to field stronger selections more often than not if they so choose. Sure, some games will fall under a test camp or feature some element of minute minding, but no side can afford to dip too much because of the change in qualification for the Champions Cup.
To ensure that the top of the URC isn’t dominated by Irish and South African sides, it was voted that each regional pool would get an automatic qualifier for the Champions Cup. This means that there will be one guaranteed Welsh, Irish, South African and Scottish/Italian side in the Champions Cup each season but that also means that the other 12 sides will, essentially, be vying for only four qualification spots.
The Irish voted against this – we wanted full meritocracy to decide qualification – but I understand the perspective of the others too. Whatever the reasoning, that decision has turned the regular season into a meat grinder. Every game is important. In the conference system, there were games – out of conference matchups – that, if you couldn’t afford to lose outright, they didn’t hurt you at the very least.
If Munster were playing Leinster, for example, the losses at the time didn’t really hurt us in our conference because Leinster were listed on a different table. If anything, Munster playing Edinburgh this last season was more important than playing Ulster or Leinster from a league management perspective because any points we’d potentially earn against Edinburgh were inherently more valuable because they directly denied them points, which made winning our conference easier.
That doesn’t apply in the URC because not only are we directly competing against Leinster and Ulster in the league table, we’re also going up against them in our regional pool.
So sure, you can and must rotate your test players but you dare not lose an InterPro in this system because if you are not finishing top of your regional pool, you are in a shark tank just to qualify for the Champions Cup.
That brings in the question of when you rotate your test players. Do you do it on tour to South Africa and just eat two pumpings and hope to recover later in the season? Or do you risk rotating your squad away to a Welsh side who might load up their test guys that week?
It’s almost an inevitability that the URC will produce regular games between full strength Munster sides against full strength Welsh, Scottish, South African and Italian sides with real stakes on the line. In that regard, what is the difference between a game in the URC and a game against, say, Glasgow or Scarlets in the Champions Cup pool? Not much, in my opinion.
The key will be if this produces a response from the casual fan at the turnstiles week to week. I think it will, once they see that the URC isn’t just the league they knew and that it’s more like the English Premier League, if I can mix in another sporting metaphor.
More stakes, more drama, more tension, more spite, more tight races and bigger, badder opponents with the spectre of missing out on the Champions Cup in the background – what’s not to love?
