Training in England is not good PR move

The Irish squad and management assembled in London last night and, irony of ironies given recent exchanges, will train as the guests of London Irish for the next two days, before moving on to Italy tomorrow. Is this the thin end of the wedge? Henceforth will they not set foot in Ireland on the week of internationals?

Maybe it will prove a one-off. Of course, it makes logistical sense now that so many players are based across the water. However - and though the players and management might not like me for this - whatever about their convenience, it makes for lousy PR.

Even if there were only two men watching the squad sessions at the exposed ALSAA complex heretofore (as winter overtook autumn, the dog presumably passed away of hypothermia) that merely shows how poorly the sessions were promoted in the schools.

It would be fair enough if they were amateurs and working in England, but, after all, the players are paid a pretty generous retainer before match fees and bonuses - £35,000 or £50,000 for home-based players, along with £14,000 to £25,000 for English-based players on top of their club salaries. Given that, surely the Union should maximise their promotional potential? And basing the squad in England seems a curious way of going about that. Rather than train in England over the next two days, wouldn't it be better for the promotion of the game if the Irish squad were training in front of invited audiences from Irish schools?

Readers mightn't like this column occasionally drawing comparisons with football. Nevertheless, it's worth noting that, even though the Republic of Ireland squads were exclusively drawn from outside Ireland, I cannot recall Jack Charlton ever bringing them together in England even for away internationals.

No doubt reasons will be given for this decision which meant it was impossible to do otherwise. Yet, in many ways, the decision to base the squad in England is somewhat symptomatic of a shift towards all things English. At the heart of this there is almost a conflict of interests between the IRFU and the Irish international squad which has led to much disgruntlement in domestic circles.

Recently, a Leinster player on a part-time, one-year IRFU contract of £7,500 drew some covetous approaches from an English Premiership club. The club in question approached the union and offered to buy out his contract so as to bring him over to England this season rather than next. The Union, in accordance with their stated policy of striving to keep players within these shores, declined the offer. Yet the player, when seeking advice from someone on high, was encouraged to go to England and so become a better player.

In the light of many of the representative selections this season, especially the A squad to play Canada, there is a growing sense of alienation, based on a belief that there is a preference for English-based players, even from lower division sides like Rotherham, over players from top Irish sides such as Shannon.

St Mary's, of course, mightn't be sharing that feeling, but, in Shannon, there is a feeling of bewilderment and mystification that Mick Galwey hasn't been included in either the Development v Exiles trial in Limerick or the A squad for the game against Canada. Playing consistently well this season for Munster and Shannon, Galwey is probably tired of being asked "what did you do to them?"

THE same mixture of anger and pity applies to the cases of Anthony Foley and now Eddie Halvey. Halvey played brilliantly for Shannon on Saturday, but there was no Irish selector present. The popular view down Limerick way now is that Halvey may as well be playing in Outer Mongolia as for the three-times All-Ireland League champions for all the difference its going to make to his representative prospects for the rest of the season. That may well be right.

Yet the sad truth is that the clubs only have themselves to blame in some respects. We have laboured this one to death, but suffice it to say that, purely out of myopia and self-interest, it was they who expanded the first division and so sacrificed quality for quantity. Nor is the decision to reduce the top tier to 12 clubs going to make a great deal of difference.

From five AIB games this writer has covered this season, two of them have been tryless draws, scaling the abysmal heights of 3-3 and 9-9. It wouldn't happen anywhere else in the world. The league desperately needs a radically improved approach, which probably only bonus points for tries scored is going to achieve. And now, just as the league was picking up a bit of momentum, they have to go into another mid-season hiatus before picking up the pieces early in the new year.

Again this mightn't go down well with the families of players, coaches and even some supporters (come to think of it, my own as well) but might it have been commercially more viable to use the holiday period to play more League fixtures?

Sympathy on this score for the clubs is again partly diminished by their own worsening, and sometimes non-existent, sense of PR. For the Lansdowne-Terenure game on Sunday, one half of Lansdowne Road was closed for road works causing congestion outside which was compounded by there being only one entrance for spectators at the Lansdowne end. This was a Lansdowne game, not a Wanderers game you see.

Just as well there weren't too many at it. Those that attended were left to guess the identity of two numberless Lansdowne substitutes, and numbers that didn't tally after no replacement shirt could be found for Warren O'Kelly other than a number 19. Somehow, you couldn't imagine this happening in the English Premiership.

In fairness, the standard of tackling at Lansdowne Road on Saturday was very high and in five of the other six first division ties over the weekend, the winning side scored 30 points or more. Everything went pretty much to form as well, in the absence of any truly heavyweight collisions, and the league is building up nicely to some intriguing New Year contests between the top four, unbeaten sides (Terenure v Ballymena and Shannon v Young Munster).

The play-off places may well be carved up between teams from the existing top five, and when news of St Mary's 70-point haul filtered through to Thomond Park, Brent Pope immediately observed that "super clubs" have started to evolve. Only three rounds have been completed, but already there are clear signs of an elite within an elite being formed.