Celtic Cup not doing our sides any favours

Why, oh why, is the Celtic League being suspended after just two rounds of games so the hybrid Celtic Cup can be foisted upon the rugby public next weekend? It's like bringing the FA Cup third round forward from January to early September, after just two rounds of the Premiership. In other words, it's daft.

Lest the Celtic League's recently appointed CEO, Keith Grainger, interprets this as the opinion of another "cynical scribe" who "still seems to rejoice in writing repetitive and negative column inches", this is far from the case. While reservations remain about whether the IRFU powerbrokers have fully thought through the impact of an expanded Celtic League - or taken on board private reservations from the provinces - there's no doubt that in the absence of Ireland's World Cup squad the nucleus of the 2007 panel is probably being blooded right now.

Not that one would necessarily share Grainger's rather grandiose claim that with the expanded Celtic League as "the backbone to our domestic game I guarantee that the current English dominance of the international game won't last too much longer and by the 2007 World Cup who knows, we might have a Celtic favourite for the 'Big One'."

Aside from the negative impact on four clubs who will be removed from a competition so early in the season, this flawed scheduling interrupts the momentum the Celtic League had started to generate before the World Cup hogs centre stage, particularly as Munster and Ulster have been given a bye and are idle next weekend.

There are a host of other inequities. For example, Connacht played the first of three successive away games on Saturday in Cardiff, and unless they beat the Borders away in the Celtic Cup on Friday and then procure a home draw in the quarter-finals in the first weekend of October, Michael Bradley's men will not be seen in the Sportsground again until October 11th - a gap of five weeks.

Similarly, unless Munster are drawn at home in the Cup quarter-finals their next home match will be four weeks away.

Alan Gaffney's untypically tetchy response on Friday to an ill-timed question about the ending of Munster's long, proud, unbeaten 20-match run at Thomond Park - "I couldn't care less about the record" - was understandable and perhaps betrayed Gaffney's annoyance that we in the media had made too much of it in the build-up.

It had to go some day, of course, and with Munster effectively denied 20 players, it was no great surprise the record went on Friday. In truth, the remark conveyed that he was more upset by the performance than by losing a record. It was bad enough the lineout was shredded by Chris Wyatt and company, though this was always going to be a potential Achilles' heel for Munster on the night given a makeshift second-row pairing and a smallish back row.

Worse, though, was that Munster remain the only side in the competition who have yet to score a try. For a coach who prides himself on enabling his teams to think creatively, it irked Gaffney that Munster "ran out of ideas" after belatedly applying some urgency to their play in the last 10 or 15 minutes.

Only Jeremy Staunton attempted something different. Seeing the Scarlets' red line push up quickly once more, Staunton quick-wittedly and deftly grubber-kicked the ball in behind them but, to loud groans, couldn't gather the pick-up.

In truth, Staunton had been beaten by a wicked bounce, but for which he would have penetrated the Llanelli defence.

Putting your body on the line is often and rightly acclaimed as physical bravery, but attempting to unlock a defence as Staunton did then requires a nerve which is just as courageous.

The safer option is to put one's head down and go to ground when tackled, which is what a procession of Munster ball carriers did. The sense of panic wasn't quite on the scale of the endgame in Lens, but it did bring that fateful night to mind.

Perhaps the players had been affected by the Thomond record in the build-up to the game, as no doubt were the 6,000 crowd, so, in one respect, maybe it's a monkey off their backs. Whether the Munster support base will now ebb, as one or two were forecasting afterwards, only time will tell, but that's probably a prematurely negative forecast.

The thought occurred, however, that Llanelli had more to play for, and not just because Munster at Thomond Park is the biggest scalp about in the Celtic League (or Europe) right now. There's also been a discernibly more upbeat tone from Wales about the competition this year than has been emanating from Ireland.

Saturday's Welsh double over Leinster and Connacht means the Irish provinces have lost all four head-to-heads with their Welsh counterparts so far, whereas over the previous two seasons they had won 35 of 40 meetings. Wales's five entities are absorbing the hits from the World Cup a tad better than Munster, Leinster and Ulster are, while at the same time the Welsh themselves have been boosted by their new structures. But also the Welsh and the Scots are fully aware that their unions have decreed that final Celtic League standings will determine qualifying places and rankings for the European Cup and Shield.

In their wisdom, the IRFU have declined, of course, to do likewise, and no one in Irish rugby is under any illusions as to why this is so. But in their eagerness to maintain the cosy cartel and forever suppress Connacht (before perhaps moving once more to disband them altogether) in actual fact the union aren't doing the competitive instincts of Munster, Leinster and Ulster any favours either.