On and off Broadway
JOHN FOGARTY could have been forgiven for wondering just what all the fuss was about when he finally made his Heineken Cup debut for Leinster in front of just over 5,000 people at a near-deserted Murrayfield back in October of 2008.
For the previous five years the Tipperary man’s European experiences had been confined to the less vaunted Challenge Cup in which he appeared 27 times. The footfall for that Edinburgh game wasn’t exactly a leap from the numbers he had known in Galway.
That soon changed. Seven months later, he was back at the home of Scottish rugby playing his part off the bench in Leinster’s first Heineken Cup success when Michael Cheika’s side edged a tight contest against the Leicester Tigers in front of about 66,000 paying customers.
There were other days of note before concussion issues forced retirement upon him at the start of this season — seismic RDS victories against Wasps and Clermont Auvergne as well as his last big game in a blue shirt, the semi-final loss to Toulouse at Le Stade Municipal.
Great days all, memorable games sprinkled with the finest of rugby players and back-dropped by arenas filled with supporters in full voice, but ask Fogarty to put his finger on the difference between the Heineken and Challenge cups and the answer falls far from the match day itself.
“I’ve experienced both but the build-up for a Heineken Cup game is on another level,” he explains. “The atmosphere and occasion itself is something else and you feel it all week. The game and the competition is advertised so well, it is seen by players and fans for days leading up to a game. I used to get hugely intense from days before it.
“You can’t do that every week. It was great to be involved with those games with Leinster, semi-finals and finals. The game day of any Heineken Cup match is unique. We played a Magners League final last year and that’s a great competition but the quarter-final of the Heineken Cup [against Clermont] was bigger, if I’m being honest.” Fogarty wasn’t entirely new to the Heineken Cup when he pitched up in Dublin. A three-year stint with Munster at the start of the millennium may not have worked out as planned but it did afford him a box seat for some doozies like the semi-final in 2001 when he sat on the bench as Declan Kidney’s side saw off Castres in Beziers.
His native province return to France today, this time to the industrial city of Brive, for what will be their first ever appointment in the ERC’s secondary competition. There is an element of the unknown about the whole venture given Munster’s long-time love affair with its bigger sibling.
It may not be the Heineken Cup but the Amlin roll of honour makes for an impressive read, with Clermont Auvergne, Harlequins, Sale, Wasps and Cardiff all former champions; the Blues claimed last year’s honours in front of a record 48,990 fans by beating Toulon.
The competition is clearly moving on up. This year’s final will be played at the City of Cardiff Stadium the night prior to the Heineken decider and, as things stand, Munster, Clermont Auvergne, Stade Francais and Wasps are all in with a shout of attending. Not too shabby.
“The Amlin is very important for the teams in it,” says Fogarty. “It is so important for clubs to win trophies. It doesn’t matter what the trophy is and that’s the way Munster will be looking at it. They will be in this to win whereas with Connacht we nearly used to look at the teams in it and say, ‘How the hell are we going to win this?’
“That was especially the case when we got to the end of the competition. You had teams like Harlequins and Montpellier. At the time you always told yourself you can beat anybody because that’s the way you had to think as a player and that carried you through the game but it got very tough the further you went.”
Connacht’s experiences of the competition have yo-yoed down the years. From year to year, they never knew what the competition would throw at them and there were more than a few unusual destinations where they met opponents such as Rovigo, Steaua Bucharest and Catransa El Salvador.
There were great days, too. The province reached but lost three semi-finals, the last of them to Jonny Wilkinson’s Toulon at home last season, and Fogarty cherishes the memories of wins over Worcester, Harlequins and a Sale side that boasted Jason Robinson, Mark Cueto, Charlie Hodgson, Andrew Sheridan and Sebastien Chabal.
Victories over the English sides meant more, not because of their nationality but because Premiership opponents could always be depended upon to show up. The same could never be said for their French counterparts who, according to Fogarty “never gave a crap” on the road during his time.
Unfortunately for Munster, the same never applied on the continent where local sentiment always guaranteed a contest no matter what the pool table said and Fogarty can still recall hairy scraps in Montpellier among other places.
“I don’t know what it was. Maybe there was always that sense of pride over there, that feeling they wanted to show respect for their town or their region or whatever and we had some right old battles over there.”
Munster be warned.
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