Rugby’s continued growth shows no sign of stopping
A few years back, during what was obviously a very slow day, this column had the time and inclination to calculate the fact that, in the space of one 12-month period, no less than 103 visits had been paid to Croke Park. Games, press conferences, seminars, award nights. They all add up.
If only they ran a loyalty card.
Here’s the thing, though, tweak the circumstances ever so slightly and an experience that has become oh so comfortable and, we have to admit, one that is all too often taken for granted, becomes something of a head wreck. Seven years on and the memories of walking up to GAA HQ to watch the national rugby and soccer teams play there for the first few times still sit awkwardly. Tricolours and chants. It just never… fit.
We were reminded of that earlier this week when a bunch of us media folk — more than a few of whom had been seconded from more familiar seasonal duties on GAA or soccer — found ourselves standing around Newstead ‘A’, the building Leinster Rugby call home, in the middle of summer and, the last time we checked, the oval code’s off-season for the launch of the latest new kit.
There have been similar bemused gatherings in Belfast, Cork, Limerick and Galway in recent weeks with our four professional provinces managing to edge their way back into our collective consciousness just as the GAA’s football and hurling championships are bubbling to a boil. Rugby we tend to equate with freezing days and nights at the RDS, Thomond Park or Lansdowne Road (the Aviva: now there’s another slight change to the match-going experience that will never sit comfortably).
That’s the thing, though. For those of covering rugby this last decade or more, there has been a very definite contraction in the length of time the game disappears fully from our radar. Most of us at Leinster’s press conference on Tuesday were still putting the finishing touches to our pieces when the Irish women’s team stood facing the haka at Marcoussis before what would prove to be a famous day in this country’s sporting history.
The hope is that that victory by Philip Doyle’s squad will prove, in retrospect, to be the starting point in a most successful season that won’t so much end as reach its apex with the 2015 Rugby World Cup in England next September and October before the northern hemisphere’s pros return to their clubs and into the guts of another gruelling domestic and international season.
Some of the Irish players who reported for pre-season earlier this summer may well find themselves playing rugby, or preparing for it, on a more or less continuous basis for the next 24 months: from the season to come, the truncated summer of 2015 when World Cup preparations will kick in, through to that tournament itself and on through another season which will end only when Ireland complete a tour of South Africa.
That’s a startling schedule. Bonkers, some would say. It’s all the more remarkable given the fact the 2015 extravaganza will kick off just over three weeks after the game of rugby union has celebrated its 20th anniversary as a professional sport. In human terms, the game is only just leaving its gauche and clumsy teenage years behind. Its prime is years away yet and the mind boggles as to what the game can still achieve.
RWC is already the third biggest sporting event on the planet, by most estimates. The International Rugby Board expects to post a surplus of something close to €200m from the event being hosted by England, 60% more than that made by New Zealand in 2011 and 19% on top of the previous record which was earned by France in 2007. It is a sport that has its critics, but rugby has morphed from a quaint pastime beloved of mostly folk in branches of what was formerly known as the British Empire into a global colossus.
The decision by the International Olympic Committee in October 2009 to welcome the sevens version of the game back into the fold, starting with the 2016 Games in Rio de Janeiro, has only served to cement the game’s status as the climbing ivy of the sporting sector.
And so it is that we will be treated to live sevens rugby with some of the game’s finest talents on display from the Deodoro Zone in Rio this very month in 2016. Where the game is in another two decades is anybody’s guess.
