Elitist, cut-throat, pressurised - and now 'live and exclusive' on Setanta Sports. It's a wonder many southside rugby players survive the Leinster Schools Senior Cup. In fact, many of them don't. They drift away from the game soon after. So, is it time for a new approach? Gerry Thornley, Rugby Correspondent, reports.
The media coverage given to schools' rugby, and primarily the Leinster Schools Senior Cup, is grotesquely out of proportion to its importance in the overall scheme of things. There should be no surprise that a competition which features the privileged middle-class schools of south Dublin whips up a media frenzy. Newspapers are chasing circulation. Setanta Sports, which has just begun "live and exclusive" coverage of schools' rugby, is scouring for potential subscribers.
It is a great spectacle. Leinster Senior Cup matches can attract up to 6,000 on weekends and, of course, up to 20,000 for the St Patrick's Day final at Lansdowne Road. It may not matter a whit to the great bulk of the population. But it is high-octane stuff for the schools and their wider communities.
The schools' game is like that. It operates as a sporting island within an island - a bubble. Most of the matches are played in a fantastically competitive spirit. They undoubtedly provide great theatre and much drama, but they also imbue young egos with an even more inflated sense of their own self-importance. Sadly, the Setanta Sports deal may only heighten this.
You criticise the schools' game and especially the Leinster Schools Senior Cup at your peril, or at any rate you'd want to leave the engine running.
Pat Kenny felt obliged to apologise on radio last Monday morning for a comment about the player drop-off rate at some rugby-playing schools and the near tribal rivalries it has been known to provoke.
Kenny's observations were entirely valid. At half-time during last Tuesday's match, two of the cheerleaders from High School went down the side of the pitch to goad the assembled blue and white Blackrock hordes at the other end of the main stand with hand gestures. They were aggressively ushered away by two of their Blackrock counterparts. All live on TV.
Admittedly, it is worth stating that the first these schools learnt of the Setanta deal was when they read about it in the newspapers. One of their more enlightened coaches/teachers sees the television coverage as a valid opportunity to further promote the game. But he also acknowledges the potential dangers of giving this kind of exposure to 17- and 18-year-olds.
For its defenders, schools' rugby is the bedrock of the game in this country, especially in Leinster. It is a view which is hard to dispute - even if this is also at the root of the perception that the sport has been somewhat elitist.
Certainly elitism was endemic in the approach of the Irish Rugby Football Union, which did little to extend the growth of the game beyond those established parameters for more than 100 years. Of the 15 players who appeared for Ireland against England 20 years ago at Lansdowne Road in the victory that clinched the Triple Crown and championship, all of them learnt the game at rugby-playing schools and were effectively products of the provincial senior cups.
Things have changed a little, and the game has expanded to the extent that players from outside the schools' playing system have progressed through the ranks. The underage game at senior and junior clubs is thriving, and often co-exists with the schools' game. Yet the dependency on the traditional conveyor belt remains. Of the 15 who played against South Africa and Argentina last autumn, all bar two played at traditional rugby-playing schools.
Viewed in that light, the schools' game has clearly been the lifeblood of Irish rugby for more than a century. But do the schools' cups and the ethos of knock-out rugby, with all the pressure and the win-at-all-costs attitude that the attendant media exposure - and now television coverage - brings necessarily enhance this production line of young players?
Defenders of the schools' game say it has been a key factor in the rejuvenation of Irish rugby. But this can, more accurately be traced back to the dominance of the Munster clubs throughout much of the 1990s - after the belated inception of the All-Ireland League - and then, in turn, to the provinces, especially Munster.
On top of that, a rich seam of talent has been harnessed like never before by professionalism. Extensive improvements in indigenous coaching, with a greater emphasis on skills' development, has also played a vital role.
Irish sport has always placed undue importance on winning at under-age level rather than skills' development. I remember once spending two days at Ajax football club in Amsterdam, pound for pound the most productive academy in European football, prior to Holland's Ajax-based 2-0 win over Ireland in the play-off for the 1996 European Championship finals.
Watching an Ajax under-8 side beat a local under-10 team, the coach remarked that, in keeping with the club's philosophy of developing pacy, quick-witted, technically adept, two-footed footballers, the result was actually immaterial. On foot of writing the piece, about two weeks later the FAI's then National Director of Coaching commented to me: "But sure our under-18s beat them 4-2 last month."
The number of players from successful Irish football and rugby sides who reached under-age European or world finals who even continue playing is negligible. And this high fall-off rate is endemic in the numbers of schools' cup players who continue playing at club level.
Even Blackrock College, unquestionably the foremost rugby-playing school in Ireland, does not seem to produce as many players as before, and ditto the traditional feeder schools of St Mary's and Terenure.
For many years, despite consistently reaching the final of the Leinster Schools Senior Cup, the amount of former Clongowes players who went on to play club rugby could be counted on the fingers of one hand, with Gordon D'Arcy and Des Dillon at Leinster the exception rather than the rule. Take the team of 2000 as an example - only three of whom are now playing rugby at any level.
The fall-off rate elsewhere is even more dramatic. The high-profile, highly-pressurised environment of schools' cup rugby cannot be solely blamed for this - there aremany factors that bring about similar drop-off rates in other sports - changing social patterns, greater variety of sports and pastimes, the demands of further education and employment, and so forth.
Nonetheless, it has assuredly been a factor. For many, adapting from the higher intensity, bigger crowds and media profile of schools' cup rugby to the less celebrated environment of under-19 or club rugby wasn't attractive.
In that sense, the schools' game might be perceived as being simply too good, but in other ways, it was also too demanding. The sudden escapism and social life offered by college and life away from school and rugby has been eminently more attractive.
Imported rugby players and coaches to this country have looked on with amazement on many a chilly February afternoon at the phenomenon that is the Leinster Schools Senior Cup. Nearly all of them have expressed the same reservations about the whole concept of high-profile, knock-out rugby.
One of them, the former Australian international and Leinster coach Gary Ella, was moved to comment in this newspaper: "I don't see how you can have a school system where the schools could only play one game. They've got to be playing week in, week out at school. I mean, even if it's only a 10-week competition. It's got to be a league and they've got to play against each other. Pick the best 10 sides in Ireland, or even the Leinster province, and have them play against each other on a home-and-away basis . . . I really don't believe the knock-out competition produces the best schoolboy."
Needless to say, he was condemned for his observations and felt obliged to backtrack slightly. YetElla's observations were entirely valid, and emanated from a culture which places a far greater emphasis on league rugby and skills development.
In fairness, the schools' committee of the Leinster Branch has examined other options, but the schools themselves are reluctant to tamper with tradition.
This year, the same four schools - plus possibly St Michael's, Ballsbridge - will continue to dominate.
To the vast majority out there, the Leinster Schools Senior Cup will remain an irrelevance, but to those involved in it or who retain an umbilical link with one of the competing schools, it will continue to be revelled in and cherished. The advent of television coverage will merely feed its sense of self-importance.
More than ever, it seems, it is now both a sacred cow and a cash cow.
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