Whelan: the crowd shouts ‘Munster’ not ‘Thomond Park’

HE WAS a hard and uncompromising hooker in his playing days, and Pat Whelan was brooking no argument yesterday on the merits of selling the naming rights of Thomond Park.

“What really matters to the players are the 80 minutes on the pitch”, the Thomond Park redevelopment chairman declared. “We’re preserving 12,000 who stood in Thomond Park and the other 800 or so who sat in the stand. They created the atmosphere which is what counted for the players. Now we’re giving them two stands — we’ll have another 15,000 all shouting ‘Munster, Munster, Munster’.

“The fans don’t shout ‘Thomond Park’. They shout ‘Munster’. You ask the players. That’s what wins matches. During the matches, that’s what counts. Everything else is secondary — it matters but not on the same basis. You’re looking at a different situation. It matters in terms of teams being afraid to come to Limerick but they’re still coming to Limerick. So I think after a matter of bedding in, it will be accepted.”

Whelan is satisfied it will be a stadium of which Limerick, Munster and Ireland can be justifiably proud while also under no illusions as to the extent of the challenge. Of course, he recognises the plan to change the name to accommodate a business or commercial company, a scheme that would accrue in the region of €15million towards the overall cost of €43m, will be bitterly resented and resisted by thousands of Munster fans.

He sympathises with the point of view but places “reality” ahead of “nostalgia” as he drove on to create a palatial 26,000 capacity facility.

Whelan certainly can’t be accused of not appreciating how much the name “Thomond Park” means to the hundreds of thousands who have been regular visitors there since it opened for play in 1934. After all, he was a member of the legendary Munster side that defeated the All Blacks in 1978 and played many other big games there as well.

“The simple fact is that we are committed to handing over a debt-free stadium and to achieve that we must raise another €15m”, he said yesterday. “Nobody knows better than me and the committee and all the fellows I played with the difficulty with the naming rights. But the reality is that we have to hand over a debt free stadium. There’s about €12-15m available from the naming rights which we have to investigate and see what the potential is.

“But they’re just part of a package and we have to investigate all of those and we’ll see the market and look at the situation then. I know €15m is realistic because we have already spoken to three commercial firms on a competitive basis and they’ve all given us figures which are not miles away from what we are after.”

Whelan explained they are moving on this now rather than in the middle of a busy rugby season and because they “need to get offers on the table, tease out things like the length of contract, and see where we’re going.

“We want to be trailblazers when it comes to providing facilities for our supporters and players.”

Whelan reckons the Branch has approximately €12m in the bankas a result of ticket sales butpointed out that they had tobuy nearby houses to acquire the space on which to build the new stand.

“We decided to do it in the overall interest because in terms of ten or 20 years, what we’d have been charged would be massive and people would have said ‘why didn’t you do it at the start’. Also, we wouldn’t have been able to build the stand because we wouldn’t have had the space.”