History smiles favourably at Irish sides

On Rugby:Quarter-final weekend in the Heineken European Cup. A massive weekend for Irish rugby. Up there with a Six Nations weekend. What Alex Ferguson calls squeaky-bum time. The remainder of the Irish season always, somehow, seems to hinge on the outcome of this weekend.

Were Munster and Leinster to lose in Llanelli and Wasps on Friday and Saturday, suddenly April and May will seem like a prolonged anti-climax.

Alternatively, were either, or preferably both, to progress, it would sustain Irish interest in the tournament for another three weeks and hopefully beyond to the end-of-May final.

UIster, Connacht and the club game mightn't necessarily agree, but it would also sustain the feel good factor in Irish rugby and lend more interest to both the Magners Celtic League and AIB All-Ireland League run-ins.

They'll have to do it the hard way, of course, given those concluding defeats in the pool stages to Leicester and Gloucester contrived to send them abroad for away quarter-finals to two of the fortresses of Welsh and English club rugby.

The Scarlets haven't lost in Stradey Park in 14 months, they qualified more impressively than anyone and expect to have Stephen Jones et al back this Friday.

Wasps may not be the force they were under Warren Gatland, but at full-strength, are still a mighty big occasion team, especially at Adams Park, where they have lost only once in 13 competitive games this season, to Leicester last November.

The Irish duo, as we are all painfully aware, will be without their captains, Paul O'Connell and Brian O'Driscoll, and the question of leadership will appear more acute if Anthony Foley is also ruled out for Munster, as you look through the names of the Munster forwards and for all their experience there are no obvious leaders.

But history has shown us that both sides, and especially the reigning European champions, can deliver against the odds. Thanks in the main to Munster, only once in the last seven years has no Irish side advanced beyond the coming weekend.

That was two years ago, when Leinster lost 29-13 at Lansdowne Road to Leicester, and Munster lost 19-10 to Biarritz in San Sebastien the next day. It was a pretty horrible weekend, and it made for a desultory end to the season despite Munster's Celtic Cup final win over Llanelli.

Historically, away wins in the last eight have been notoriously difficult to obtain. In the first five years of quarter-finals, there were only two out of 20 ties, but there have been eight out of 20 in the last five years.

Munster are the only side to register two away wins (along with two defeats) in the quarter-final stages, while Leinster of course memorably dethroned Toulouse last year with that stunning 41-35 triumph in Le Stadium. Despite keeping this tie at Stradey Park, Llanelli have lost two of their three previous quarter-finals at their spiritual home while Wasps, too, have lost one out of two.

Indeed, there is no statistical evidence that moving to bigger stadia necessarily increases the risk of losing, but in declining to do so, along with Leicester, these three clubs have denied access to around 40,000 spectators, with the net reduction of over €1 million in gate receipts alone.

It betrays a staggering lack of ambition, which is made all the more ironic given Llanelli's debts and the constant bleating of the English clubs for more voting rights and shares in the running of ERC.

This is supposedly the kernel of the problem in the ongoing stance by the French clubs, the Ligue Nationale de Rugby, to boycott next year's European tournaments. Last Thursday Bernard Lapasset, president of the French Federation, met with the clubs and then met RFU officials the next day with the message that the French clubs would rescind their boycott if the English Union conceded share and voting rights to the English clubs.

Once more, the RFU have steadfastly refused to be dictated to by the French clubs.

Meanwhile, a scheduled ERC board meeting has been deferred until Wednesday, but the driving force behind the French boycott, the LNR's president Serge Blanco has re-iterated that the "ball is in their (the RFU's) court" and imposed a deadline of March 31st, next Saturday.

Lapasset will meet with the LNR again next week but it would appear that too many of the leading personalities are entrenched in their views even if, contradictorily, there's always the chance that the ground could shift amid such posturing.

Many of Blanco's concerns about the club game in France and England (the last bastions of the club game globally) are valid, but it seems as if the French clubs are looking for a face-saving way of re-entering the Euro fold.

It's dawned on many French clubs that non-participation reduces interest on the run-in and top six qualification. Furthermore, the rumoured €40 million per annum television deal for the Top 14 with Canal + has apparently only yielded €23 million or so, and that therefore the €8 million from the ERC is not to be sniffed at.

Though it may suit the French to bow out of Europe due to a fixture pile-up in World Cup year, this apparently is a secondary issue. The English clubs are legally bound to compete in Europe for another two years due to their own agreement with the RFU, and in the absence of the French Top 14 the RFU have suggested Lapasset invite teams from the French second division to compete, while the English clubs have suggested that their dozen Premiership clubs be accommodated in next season's European Cup and abandon the Challenge Cup (which could also mean a route into the Cup for Connacht).

Ultimately, though, if the future of the European Cup hinges on the RFU and the English clubs resolving their differences, then the brief but turbulent history of professionalism would suggest that the tournament is goosed.

Blanco, a truly iconic figure of the game globally, is deified in his own country, but history will then record that one of his legacies, along with the English Union and their clubs, will have been to kill the shining light of rugby in the northern hemisphere.

Ironically, his own beloved Biarritz will never again be able to play in San Sebastien, thereby ending their Basque expansionism, but Irish rugby would arguably be the biggest loser of all.

For we will have no more weekends like the one coming up.