Dublin can now claim to be the home of world rugby. Shane Hegarty reports how the game's supremos came to town
It kicked off as the European Rugby Cup on a playing-field in Romania eight years ago. Next month, as the Heineken Cup, it will confirm its elevated status with a final played in front of 49,000 people at Lansdowne Road and millions more watching on television. When Leinster played in the tournament's first semi-final 7,000 went along to watch them. Tomorrow, 45,000 will see their return to that stage of the competition, when they take on Perpignan in Dublin. Meanwhile, 10,000 Munster fans are travelling to France to see their team take on Toulouse today.
Two Irish teams competing in the semi-finals of a tournament organised from a Dublin office and run by an Irishman. In a certain respect, Dublin can lay claim to being the home of world rugby.
Lansdowne Road may be the world's oldest international venue, but it wasn't sentimentality which brought the European Rugby Cup Ltd (ERC) - which runs the Heineken Cup and subsidiary competitions the Parker Pen Challenge Cup and the Parker Pen Shield - to the city in 1996. It was the same year that the sport's governing body, the International Rugby Board (IRB), relocated here too. Both, in fact, are located in the same building, Huguenot House, off St Stephen's Green.
"Ireland is viewed very positively, and I think it's something that runs across all sports," says Derek McGrath, chief executive of the ERC. "It is seen as neutral territory, and it is also a very popular place to have a company like this; people enjoy coming here."
The tax breaks available to sporting bodies helped too, but McGrath - who gained five Irish international caps during the mid-1980s - says that Ireland's perceived neutrality was important at a time when the game was adjusting to the professional era, and nations were jockeying for a share of the spoils. Originally based in England, the ERC felt it was important to move its base from the confines of one of its two biggest shareholders. While the 12 directors of the ERC are split evenly between the six shareholding countries, France and England hold the biggest financial share, Ireland, Scotland and Wales are next in line, and Italy holds the least.
The ERC'S first tournament director was former Irish team manager Ken Reid, and its first chairman was Irish legend Tom Kiernan. It becomes easier to understand why Leicester might have accused the ERC of bias in a row with Munster over ticket allocations for their recent match. "Whenever we get involved in any dispute, irrespective of whether there are Irish teams involved, we find that when we make hard decisions we are liable to be accused of bias towards somebody," says McGrath. "If it favours a French team, we get accused of bias because we have a French chairman, Jean-Pierre Lux. It's just a reaction to the situation. It wouldn't bother me too much."
And now, the competition faces the possibility of an all-Irish final in an Irish stadium (let's not dwell on the possibility of an all-French final). Is there a danger that, while the competition is of massive interest here, it could become a turn-off to fans in the other nations?
"I suppose if you take a snapshot now, you could come to that opinion. But the tournament is about the best teams getting to the top," says McGrath. "And the long-term view is that, while the English press are asking questions over why their teams are out of Europe, you can be damn sure those teams will be working their hardest to make sure they change that next season."
He points out that the success of the Irish teams has provided an encouraging example for Scottish and Welsh teams, and that they have helped raise the standard of competition. Yet the Irish game has been shaped by, and has adapted to, the demands of the tournament like no other country's has.
"The impact has been massive. Teams around Europe now look at Ireland with envy, in how we prepare our players and how we protect them," says McGrath. "It's a fantastic structure, and with the success has come this growing interest. The addition to that are the fans, who bring something special to each game. They behave well, they clearly enjoy the experience, and there is never any trouble. Look at the Munster games, where there was huge tension, but you can read the congratulation notes between the fans on the Leicester website, and you don't get that at any other level of the game."
Having overcome early problems, the Heineken Cup has typified rugby's transformation from an amateur game to the aggressive, commercially driven professional entity. For participating Welsh clubs, some 40 per cent of their annual income comes from the tournament. In England and France, the figure is between 15 and 25 per cent. It is unthinkable that there could be a repeat of the 1998 debacle, when a row over the fixture schedule led to English teams boycotting the tournament (to Ulster's advantage as they became the first and, so far, only Irish team to lift the trophy). Each year since, it has taken enormous strides.
"We've come to expect it, in a strange way," says McGrath. "When I arrived here, the first question asked of me was what were my ambitions. And I said that to sell out a final before we had got moving on it would be one, and we did that last year. That had been a five-year plan, but was done within two years. So now, we have stopped even setting signposts, because we tend to exceed them."
The tournament, he says, offers an "accessibility" that international matches can't. "The fans can feel close to the players. They get close to Mick Galwey or Martin Johnson in way that isn't possible with the international matches. It's an international platform, but with local teams, which also makes it more tribal."
Off the pitch, it is a critical year for the ERC, with several commercial contracts up for renegotiation. Television rights are among these, with the live coverage of matches on terrestrial television a major factor in the increased interest in the tournament and in rugby in general, but McGrath is tight-lipped about the future. The Heineken Cup, he says, now appreciates its own value and the ERC is "looking across all the platforms to decide on the best way forward".
There has also been a debate with the fans over ticket prices. The quarter-finals were under the auspices of the home teams, but the semi-finals are under those of the ERC, which doesn't print schoolboy or family tickets. It has never been the ERC's policy to do so, and "42,000 sales suggests we haven't got it wrong", says McGrath
As a former international, McGrath admits that he envies the current crop of players. "They have the opportunity to play the sport they love at such a high level. But the level of preparation they put in, their dedication, is remarkable. Credit should go to the players, and they don't always get it. None of this would happen without them. All the talk is about sponsors and broadcasters and the marketing, but our job is only to present the stage so that these players can do what they do so well."
Home advantage The Irish front row
Rugby is played in more than 100 countries, but its power base still rests in a relatively small number of countries. Yet, even given this, Ireland seems to provide a disproportionate number of the game's leading administrators.
Former Irish international player and manager Syd Millar is acting chairman of the sport's governing body, the International Rugby Board. This also makes him a director of Rugby World Cup Ltd, and it was he who announced that France would be the venue for the 2007 tournament. Tom Kiernan, who became the first chairman of the European Rugby Cup in 1995, went on to become president of the IRB and a director of the Rugby World Cup until 1999. Ken Reid was the ERC's first tournament director, and ex-international Derek McGrath became its first chief executive in 2000.