BRENDAN O’BRIEN: It’s true, you don’t know what you got ’til it’s gone
Counting Crows, too.
The Canadian songstress from Saskatchewan and the boys from Berkeley, California both released versions of Big Yellow Taxi in their day where the catchiest line starts with “You don’t know what you got till it’s gone…”
Only now, with both Munster and Leinster scuffing their heels perilously along the January precipice, can we appreciate the heights these two have reached this past decade or so and we can only hope that we are all singing a different tune come Sunday evening.
Should those two provinces fail to qualify for the quarter-finals of the Heineken Cup over the course of the coming weekend, it will be the first time that both the red and blue jerseys will be absent from the tournament’s knockout stages in the same season since the 1997/’98 campaign.
15 years is a long time, of course, but even the most cursory of glances back is to realise that it seems more like 50. How long ago was it? Well, look at it this way, Brian O’Driscoll was still studying at UCD and clubs including Swansea, Pontypridd, Scottish Borders and Caledonia were still going concerns.
Nothing about that time seems familiar to us now. It is a sepia-tinted era when bony wingers still flapped about in billowing jerseys, the game of rugby itself was only emerging from within the cocoon of its crusty old boys network and a crumbling Lansdowne Road had to creak through another decade of infirmity.
The seasons themselves were just as shambolic.
The entire provincial schedules were run off in the space of two dizzy months between August and October, Leinster were still at a point where Donnybrook was more than adequate for their needs and Munster lost at home in the Heineken Cup to Cardiff at Musgrave Park.
Such a short season was nothing new. In either sense.
Leinster and Munster fell at the first hurdle the year before (as did Ulster both times) and the provincial sides’ pitfalls were being mirrored by a national selection that could win just one game over the course of two Five Nations campaigns and even that was a one-point squeaker in Cardiff.
Then came the first bountiful harvests from the Heineken Cup and it has remained to this day the crop that keeps on giving. It is impossible to envisage the game’s current health as it is here now without the imprint of the European club game but the provinces have been every bit as good to the ERC as the other way around.
No-one argues with that.
It is a fact that can be measured in many ways but imagine an alternate history where the Irish finalists this past dozen years had instead been beaten in the penultimate round and contemplate what the effect on attendances alone would have been on the finals themselves.
It’s a bracing thought: Stade Francais instead of Ulster at Lansdowne in 1999; Castres instead of Munster in Cardiff two years later; Toulouse rather than Leinster at the Millennium Stadium in 2011. It’s a hypothetical borne out by actual events in 2003 when only 28,600 people watched two French sides play in Dublin.
Whatever way you look at it, the ERC has been blessed by the manner in which the cards have rolled come the month of May this last seven years and not just by dint of the fact that Irish provinces, with their fanatical fan bases and world-class players, have featured in five of them.
In 2007, a Twickenham final happened to be graced by two English sides — Wasps and Leicester Tigers — but the biggest stroke of luck came in 2010 when Toulouse and Biarritz navigated their ways to the decider in a year when it happened to be held in the Stade de France.
When Toulouse saw off Stade Francais in Murrayfield in 2005, there were almost 16,000 seats left undisturbed and such sights and statistics would do little now for a tournament beamed to millions of viewers on the very same day as the Champions League final. If the bookies are right, we’ll see a Toulon-Clermont Auvergne final in Ballsbridge next May when the Aviva Stadium’s capacity of 50,000 should mitigate against any repeat of the empty sections in 2005 in the event that Ulster, Munster or Leinster fail to earn their place on stage and, if that proves the case, it may herald the beginning of the end for the Irish stranglehold on Europe.
There’s no doubt it would be in the greater interest of the tournament if England and France, with their mammoth demographics and markets, could reel off a few tournament wins but it is difficult to see how the X factor the provinces bring could ever be replaced. Over to you, Joni…
*Email: rackobrien@gmail.com Twitter: @Rackob
