Weather casts a shadow over list

Figuratively and literally, a cloud hangs over the resumption of the AIB All-Ireland league this weekend. Met Eireann have issued a severe weather alert with heavy rain and wind forecast for much of the country over the weekend. As things stand, two second division games have already bitten the dust (divisions three and four are idle), while the first division programme is in the lap of the Gods.

Pitch inspections are likely to be held in most grounds this morning, while there is also a preliminary pitch inspection at mid-day today for tomorrow's big Limerick derby between holders Shannon and one of their unbeaten pretenders, Young Munster. As it happens, the top tier's two other unbeaten sides, Terenure and Ballymena, are also scheduled to meet this afternoon at Lakelands Park.

Club officials at Terenure, like Blackrock and Clontarf, were reasonably optimistic yesterday that their pitches would drain sufficiently for their games to go ahead. Nevertheless, the greater Dublin area is likely to experience the brunt of the weather, although the situation is complicated by the forecast winds of up to 65 miles per hour which should have a drying effect on the various pitches.

Were any of the first division matches to be postponed today, then in all probability they will be re-arranged for the free weekend of Saturday March 14th, as is provisionally the case for the Malone-Greystones and Wanderers-Old Wesley second division ties which were cancelled yesterday.

No less than with the decisive April play-offs, conditions are liable to be a good deal better then, in which case postponements and changing weather patterns might yet have a big bearing on the league.

However, were matches to fall foul of the weather this weekend it would further frustrate team managers and club treasurers alike who were obliged to sit idly by over the Christmas holiday weekend. Meantime, holiday crowds of 16,000 at the Leopardstown races (6,000 at Mallow on New Year's Eve) and 6,000 at the Cork-Shelbourne football game compounded the decision to leave rugby in not-so-splendid isolation last weekend.

This is clearly something which the IRFU and League's Working Party are going to have to examine. With so many expatriates at home for the festivities and sporting fixtures a popular outlet for holidayingyet-homebound families, it certainly seems like a gilt-edged opportunity missed, all the more so given the club's almost desperate need to revive crowd attendances.

Were the Shannon-Young Munster match to be postponed it would exacerbate the clubs' sense of grievance given an attendance in the region of 8,000 is forecast. The attendance would probably have been even bigger last weekend, a point not lost on the Young Munster team manager John `Packo' Fitzgerald, who described the lost weekend as "ludicrous".

Ironically, after the famine comes the feast, for this had shaped in to the most sustained and consistent spell of AIL activity since the season started, with five consecutive rounds pencilled in for the month of January. Accordingly, it is something of a make-or-break month which will surely shape an embryonic table into something more enduring.

While it is unlikely that, say, Shannon and Ballymena are currently in false positions, thus far the holders have accounted for three of the bottom six (and all at Thomond Park) while Ballymena have beaten three of the bottom five. They were the appetisers. This is the meat of the club season.