Con earning dividends for fresh approach
Cork Con were hosting St. Mary’s College, and the requisite niceties were all being observed: between the club presidents and between those who’d played in the first encounter between the two sides at that level, many of whom were present in the clubhouse.
A little heavier, a little stiffer, the men of twenty years ago mingled easily in the bar over pints and a tasty chicken curry, arguing the toss with a good deal less vehemence twenty years on.
One of this newspaper’s rugby writers was hard pressed to preserve his status as Con’s first try scorer in the All-Ireland League, for instance, as his then second-row partner gathered a popular following for his call to revisit the issue all of two decades later.
Afterwards, Con and Mary’s played out a competitive eighty minutes, with the Cork side collecting the points. The crowd was decent by AIL standards, and the game’s take-home memory was a last outing for Con’s flying winger Cronan Healy, who is heading to Australia.
But, as we said at the outset, only if you stayed on the surface.
The main rugby event on Saturday was a couple of miles west of Temple Hill in Musgrave Park, where Munster took on Glasgow a couple of hours after the AIL fixture. Although co-existing with the big show, rather than grumbling about stolen thunder, has taken Constitution a while, they’ve come to terms with their new status.
“Look, when professionalism came in first day we didn't know what to expect, what way it was going to fall,” Con’s amiable President, Der O’Riordan, explains. “We didn’t know if it was going to be twenty teams playing professional rugby or what. It ended up the ideal way, with the four provincial teams, but we needed a bit of time to take that on board.
“At one stage we'd have had the attitude, 'they're taking our players'. But they're not – the players are theirs and they play with us.
“The mindset had to change. The days of a club player heading off once or twice a year to play for Ireland were gone and we’ve had to get used to the new way.”
O’Riordan says the explosion in the popularity of rugby in Munster has paid dividends for Constitution: the club has photographs from the late sixties of its entire underage membership on the field in front of the clubhouse - maybe eighty kids in total.
Nowadays they cater for six hundred children up to the age of thirteen, all wanting to be the new Ronan O’Gara or Peter Stringer.
But rather than rely on traditional sources for new recruits, Con have tried to reach out.
“We’re doing what the GAA have done,” O’Riordan said. “We’re getting the message across that our players are doing what an inter-county player is doing during the championship season, which is giving six days a week to a sport and achieving a similar level of fitness.
“That’s our point when people say 'it's only club players' - we’re saying that people can come along and watch the new Munster players coming through.
“The fact that we had several players on the team that beat Australia, the public know the quality is there.”
Not just on the field of play, either. Engaging with the community isn’t just about providing hot coffee for parents when their kids are running around a field.
Before Saturday’s game Constitution presented a cheque to the Marymount Hospice in Cork for over €8,000. (“We robbed the idea of a ladies’ lunch for charity from St Mary’s,” O’Riordan says), and the club donated children’s gifts to local charities in the run-up to Christmas.
Granted, there are likely to be some wry smiles from other rugby clubs about Constitution getting their message out, to use O’Riordan’s term. It’s not as if they’re minnows of the game: any outfit with four All-Ireland league titles in the bank, not to mention a string of internationals and Lions - and Munster stars, latterly - will enjoy a certain profile.
Yet the big clubs across all sports become big in the first place by adopting the attitudes of a small organisation - by fighting for every member and by establishing links to their community.
Rather than roll their eyes and say they can’t compete with what Munster are offering, Constitution have decided to be proactive and there’s a lesson in that for every club.
So is their attitude to a stranger’s first point of contact with the club.
“Look at the door of the clubhouse,” O’Riordan adds. “It's a long walk from the car park into the bar. That’s intimidating for people, and we're trying to make people more welcome here. That’s why we have the sign there welcoming them - to make them feel comfortable about coming here.”
* contact: michael.moynihan@examiner.ie ; Twitter: MikeMoynihanEx
