It's been such an outstanding season for the game in this country, ideally we don't want it to end, writes GERRY THORNLEY
IDEALLY, THIS season should never end. Not the least welcome aspect of Munster and Leinster earning a second all-Irish Heineken Cup semi-final in four years is that it ensures an Irish team in the final for the fifth time in 10 years. Given Munster and Leinster lead the way in the Magners League, that means Irish rugby is most probably one match away from an historic clean sweep of Grand Slam, Six Nations, Heineken Cup, Magners League and Triple Crown in the same season.
Irish rugby possesses all this as things stand, but to win the lot in the same season would make it the grandest of years. No Celtic country has completed such a clean sweep in the same campaign.
What’s more, of the seven Grand Slams since the Heineken Cup started in 1995-96, only once have teams from one country completed a similar sweep.
But with all due respects to Brive’s win over Leicester in the 1996-97 final in Cardiff Arms Park (played in January), followed by France’s Grand Slam soon after, it is nothing like the same achievement it would be nowadays. Then it was the Five Nations, and the four Heineken Cup pools were made up of five clubs who played each other once.
And while Sky’s slick, ultra-enthusiastic coverage adds to all their rugby coverage, let’s hear it for the Magners League. In each of the previous two seasons it matched the English Premiership and out-stripped the Top 14 in the last eight. This season it provided four of the eight quarter-finals, and now three of the semi-finalists, not forgetting that 42 of the 44 players on duty in the Six Nations shoot-out in Cardiff plied their trade in the competition. The best League in Europe?
And three Saturdays from now, Irish rugby can lay claim to staging the biggest club game in history – with more than a little help from the GAA – when the 82,500 attendance will eclipse the 81,600 for last season’s Wasps-Leicester Premiership final in Twickenham. Henceforth, that will the biggest crowd to attend a club game in, eh, England.
Judging by the manner 10,000 Leinster season ticket holders snapped up semi-final tickets on Easter Monday via Ticketmaster, it won’t be a hard sell. Provincial colours were already being worn and fluttered from cars yesterday. It’s going to be another long three weeks.
It will be a uniquely Irish sporting occasion, and one to celebrate, with foreign imports contributing handsomely to it and buying into it. There’s an awful lot of nonsense out there about the supposedly overt presence of Johnny Foreigner in little old Ireland. However, Sunday underlined that Irish rugby has, overall, been remarkably well served by their imports.
Lifeimi Mafi, Paul Warwick and Doug Howlett were outstanding at Thomond Park, alongside 12 home-grown players, which was the most of any starting team in the last eight, not to mention their seven Irish replacements.
Leinster wouldn’t have won without the contribution of Rocky Elsom, among others, while the bravery of Chris Whitaker and Felipe Contepomi (like pretty much everybody on the pitch) was immense.
There was a theory expounded on one of our national radio stations prior to the last week’s Munster-Leinster Magners League match, by pundits who should really know better, that Contepomi would be “minding himself” in view of the lucrative contract coming his way at Toulon.
Eh, have you been watching Contepomi these last six years? The Puma knows only one way to play the game, and that is to put his body on the line in The Stoop on Sunday as he did. To land a 41-metre penalty within moments of becoming a victim of Ugo Monye roadkill spoke volumes for him, as did his physicality in defence thereafter.
The Irish rugby landscape will be the poorer for his leaving, but he would love nothing better than to help Leinster to their holy grail of the Heineken Cup – even if that means arriving in Toulon like an Egyptian Mummy.
The competition itself is also the poorer for Toulouse’s departure, and France will probably turn off their interest now. Typically, they were authors of their downfall, and might have considered playing for territory and working their way into drop-goal range and drawing level on the scoreboard a tad sooner.
That said, they received little or nothing from Chris White. Quite how Toulouse only received one penalty in the Cardiff half and only two in total in the second period, given Cardiff were filleted in the scrum and lived offside with impunity, was quite something.
The one three-pointer they did earn was for a blatant example of killing a ball to prevent a try-scoring recycle under the posts by Martyn Williams, and the failure to brandish a yellow card was an abrogation of responsibility. As the inestimable Stuart Barnes called it at the time, if that didn’t warrant a yellow card, nothing did.
You have to respect Cardiff’s achievements in wining away to Gloucester (with 14 men) and Biarritz, and now in putting out the only three-time winners.
Even so, you can’t help but feel it’s probably increased the chances of an Irish team lifting the trophy.
The quarter-final results also means no final for Alain Rolland, curiously inactive last weekend. The IRB’s messing around with the laws hasn’t helped the men in the middle, but with the first generation of professional referees coming to an end, there is a worrying decline and shortage in the number of elite referees.
How else to explain Nigel Owens doing all Munster’s knock-out matches last season? With Joel Jutge injured, and Rolland and Lewis ruled out, realistically the options for the semi-final in Croke Park are Owens, Wayne Barnes, White or Christophe Berdos.
PS: Apologies to Old Wesley for a reference in yesterday’s AIB League round-up to their “20-15 defeat” to Barnhall in Parsonstown on Saturday. Wesley did in fact win 15-13, and so remain second in the Division Three table and on course for promotion should they beat Sunday’s Well at home next Saturday.
The incorrect result was taken, in good faith, off the IRFU website, which was still carrying the wrong scoreline yesterday.
