I’ll stand up and fight for Munster but I can’t guarantee a knockout

Friday, May 01, 2009

The key complicating factor in the ticket equation is the group to which I belong: the Munster exile living in Dublin. We’re taking many of the tickets allocated to Leinster fans for the simple reason that this is where it’s easier for us to get our hands on them. There are nowhere near as many Leinster-born people living in Munster to take the Munster tickets

RED shirts will outnumber blue in Croke Park tomorrow, despite the best efforts of Leinster to stop the sale of tickets from its share of the allocation for the Heineken Cup semi-final to Munster supporters.

Leinster was upset three years ago to see the game at Lansdowne Road turned effectively into a home game for the southern province. It doesn’t want to see the same happening again. It’ll be hard to stop for all sorts of reasons, including the most basic of all: the laws of supply and demand.

Put simply, Munster has a greater number of more committed supporters than Leinster, despite the apparently smaller population to call upon. However, the numbers shift when you throw some different variables into what should be a straightforward equation.

Fans in Munster tend to have wider interests, particularly enjoying both rugby and Gaelic games, with a bit of soccer thrown in as well. Dublin-born Leinster rugby fans are as likely to engage in cricket as hurling during summer. That’s why tomorrow there’ll be so many Munster fans in Croke Park who have been going there for years, whereas some of the Leinster crowd only got to know the place when the Irish rugby team started playing there.

Hence the joke that’s going around, that the Leinster crowd won’t travel for the match as the northside is a bit far away for them. That’s more than a bit unfair of course in that, just like the Irish players on the team, many Leinster fans are from counties outside of Dublin (or indeed, like captain Brian O’Driscoll, from the northside of the city).

But it sums up the perception that some Leinster fans are fair-weather travellers: Leinster did not take up the full allocation of tickets for the quarter-final with Harlequins, although that too can be explained by the cost of going to London during these recessionary times. Then again, Leinster has never had the size of travelling support that Munster has: the reaction among some has been to sneer at the Munster "bandwagon", to claim that these are fair-weather supporters.

But you don’t have to live in Cork or Limerick, or any of the other four counties of the province, to remain a committed Munster supporter.

The key complicating factor in the ticket equation is the group to which I belong: the Munster exile living in Dublin. We’re taking many of the tickets allocated to Leinster fans for the simple reason that this is where it’s easier for us to get our hands on them. There are nowhere near as many Leinster-born people living in Munster to take the Munster tickets. We’re also bringing up our children, even if they speak with Dublin accents, to develop an appreciation of, and hopefully support for, Munster. A few months ago a Dublin friend gave my six-year-old daughter the present of a Leinster rugby shirt for her birthday. I was shocked at first and then complained that this was a cruel wind-up. My friend looked at me in surprise. "But she’s from Dublin and you’ve been living in Dublin for 20 years," she said. "Why don’t you support Leinster?"

Former Irish international and Leinster player Neil Francis made the point to me too on radio the other night and I had to concede I have now spent half my life in Dublin and almost all of my adult life.

But whatever about my daughter’s choice, I can’t forget where I came from. I’ve been going to Munster matches since I was a child, when my father used to bring me to the interprovincial games at Musgrave Park. I still remember, as a seven-year-old, at home in bed sick, being so upset at not being able to go to Musgrave Park to see Munster play the All-Blacks and having to listen to the radio to get the score updates. That was 1973 and the match ended up as a 3-3 draw.

It is the match that everyone forgets because of what happened five years later, but Munster were very close to winning that day, too. I can’t claim to having been in Limerick in 1978, but I also remember being at Musgrave Park in 1981 when Australia visited, only to be beaten 15-13, Tony Ward having another super game for Munster.

That heritage means that the first winning Heineken Cup final in 2006 provides one of the fondest of all my memories. It wasn’t just for the extraordinary occasion of the match either, how tense it was and how ecstatic we were when Munster finally, justly, won. It was also the craic that we had. I lost count of the number of people I met from Cork, not just people I’d played rugby with or against, but also whom I’d played with in Gaelic football matches. It was a wonderful day, completed by an encounter with the team at Cardiff airport as they celebrated with the fans that night.

That victory followed the semi-final defeat of Leinster of course. But here’s something else that should be remembered, especially by all of the people who complained that Munster people took Leinster tickets for that year’s semi-final and who are trying to ensure we don’t do so again for tomorrow. Many Leinster fans took our tickets for the 2006 final.

I was also shocked by the number of Dubliners I met at that game, many of whom had no connection with Munster but who had gone to the match because they had purchased tickets for the final in advance of a semi-final they’d expected to win. How can these people then complain about Munster people taking their tickets for tomorrow? In 2008, the atmosphere in Cardiff was different. We were nearly all Munster men and Munster women, born and bred. We had all the tickets. It was another wonderful day. I’d never expected the atmosphere to match the occasion of 2006, but it did. It was tremendous.

Tomorrow promises to be the same. I have to admit I’m going with a friend from Cork who works in Dublin and who has sourced our tickets in Dublin. It means the two of us may be surrounded by blue jerseys as we proudly wear our red.

THREE years ago I secured my ticket for the Heineken Cup semi-final between Munster and Leinster from a Leinster source. The donor was the bank that sponsored Leinster, Bank of Scotland, and whose name was written on the front of those blue jerseys. I was most grateful and relieved to get the ticket, even though I knew it meant I would be in a Leinster dominated part of the ground. It didn’t matter to me, as a Munster fan, where I was going to sit. I was going to be in the ground, and that’s all that mattered.

The bank had many people going to the game as its guests and had arranged for them to meet for a drink beforehand. I entered the room to meet a group of people, some of whom were wearing blue. Others, although from Leinster, were wearing neutral colours. There were two people wearing red. I was one of them, wearing my Munster top. I’m from Cork. What else could I do? You wear your colours with pride.

My head and heart say Munster will win, but there’s a nagging fear Leinster will pull out an enormous performance because there is no doubting their quality either and some luck has been going its way in this competition. If a few balls bounce Leinster’s way, Munster could be beaten.

Munster is the better team, but in a semi-final the better team doesn’t necessarily win. But if we do lose, we’ll take it graciously and wish Leinster all the best in the final in Edinburgh on May 23. And we’ll make sure as many Leinster people as want them can have our tickets, while we watch on TV, in my case back in Dublin.

The Last Word with Matt Cooper is broadcast on 100-102 Today FM, Monday to Friday, 4.30pm to 7pm.

This appeared in the printed version of the Irish Examiner Friday, May 01, 2009