Club game needs more left-field thinking

On Rugby: What to do with the club game has been exercising the minds of quite a few club stalwarts and the IRFU hierarchy in recent times. Long since overtaken by professionalism and the provinces, the club game has assuredly been handicapped rather than assisted by a brief glimpse of the public glare in the early and mid-1990s, albeit decades too late.

That said, better late than never, for the benefits of the AIL's glory years went all the way to the top of the Irish game. But ironically, while Shannon's winning culture provided the springboard for the rejuvenation of, in turn Munster and then Ireland, in some respects the AIL might have been better off today if it had never had those halcyon days. Unfairly, it's been a monkey on the clubs' backs.

It's easy to bemoan the club game's current ills, or the IRFU for a lack of leadership, quite another to come up with concrete proposals or ideas on how to revitalise the club game. Yet it's ideas which the club game needs more than anything else. Cue yesterday's announcement of AIB's five-year partnership agreement with the IRFU, which focuses exclusively on the domestic game. One cannot recall a more outwardly positive pronouncement on the club game in quite some time. The bank is not investing an estimated €5 million just out of the goodness of their hearts or because somebody in AIB likes rugby. We know banks aren't like that.

Nonetheless, it is the union's good fortune that not alone do AIB - with their 280 branches nationwide - prefer to take the option of supporting community-based rugby (as they do in golf and Gaelic games) rather than the higher profile aspects of the sport, but they also have a few ideas themselves and want, very much, a hands-on role at grassroots level.

The concept of AIB sponsoring one, or possibly two, annual club internationals for non-contracted players is recognition that current international players, although "attached" to various clubs, never play for their clubs anymore and in reality have little contact with them.

Ultimately, the work of Kevin Potts, the newly-appointed domestic rugby manager, and the four full-time AIB club development managers, in developing structural and volunteer programmes to regenerate activism on the ground, might be as important as anything unveiled yesterday. But it must see a return of international match tickets to club stalwarts as well as improvements in equipment and facilities. Ironically, if as welcome, the IRFU's flawed if radical proposal for a completely redrawn AIL has instead effectively led to the introduction of an AIB All-Ireland Cup, in which the provincial leagues will act as qualifiers.

However, when IRFU chief executive Philip Browne spoke yesterday of the increased need to think "outside the box", one wishes the union and AIB had been even more left-field. Club representatives are disappointed this isn't a proper, 48-team, open draw competition. No doubt the provincial branches didn't want their own leagues diluted in any way. Instead therefore, it will be limited to 17 qualifiers from the various provinces and here one can already see problems.

Connacht's two will be the league and cup winners. Fair enough. Ulster's quartet will be the top four in their senior league. Fair enough too, except that to ensure the most deserving four qualify, all 11 teams must play each other once in rapid quick time at the start of the season. This in turn, has led to midweek rounds of matches. Take, in this light, the example of Ballynahinch. Shorn of nine players through Ulster's retinue of eight A matches (a major bugbear for all the clubs in all the provinces), under-21 and under-19 games, they had to play Belfast Harlequins, City of Derry and Dungannon in an eight-day period, culminating in last Saturday's 71-5 defeat to Dungannon.

To fill their quota of six, Munster have decided to supplement their 14 senior clubs with six junior clubs, and have two knock-out rounds to leave them with five survivors - a decidedly odd way of going about it. Leinster have supplemented their 19 senior clubs with Garda, and divided their league into four sections, with the four group winners and two best runners-up progressing to the All-Ireland Cup. Hardly a fail-safe method designed to ensure the best six progress, bearing in mind Terenure's 74-0 defeat of Naas at the weekend.

However, the net effect of all this is that most clubs will not, in reality, be touched by the concept of an All-Ireland Cup. Imagine, instead, if all 48 clubs went into an open draw? That's the essence of a knock-out cup. Of even if the 32 Division Two and Three clubs had one preliminary knock-out round, at which point they were joined by the Division One clubs in the last 32? It would be far more exciting. As four weekends have already been set aside for the AIB All-Ireland Cup, it would only have required two more to encompass all 48 in an open draw.

The AIB League, which kicks off next Saturday fortnight, October 15th, will once again culminate in semi-final play-offs and three divisional title deciders on finals day in Lansdowne Road, although once more without promotion and relegation at stake.

The Division Two and Three winners ought to be promoted automatically, and thereafter the play-offs could be employed to decide who is promoted with them. Instead of having some nominal "title" to play for, were promotion (and possibly relegation) at stake, it would give real meaning to the end-of-season scrap for a top four or five place as well as the Lansdowne Road deciders.

Once again, it's a pity more left-field thinking wasn't applied here.

gthornley@irish-times.ie