Big cup kick-off goes unnoticed

For more than a century, the Munster Cup was the only rugby tournament in town, far bigger than anything else in this country or throughout England, Scotland and Wales!

The Interprovincial Championship counted as unofficial trials for the Irish team but did little to enthuse the general public. The cup competitions in Ulster, Leinster and Connacht rarely generated even the slightest degree of excitement. The provincial leagues didn’t matter at all. The proverbial two men and a dog turned up for the spate of friendlies that dominated the first six months of the season.

However, when March dawned and it was cup time again, the atmosphere crackled, crowds turned up in their thousands, initially to the Mardyke and the Markets Field and later to Thomond and Musgrave parks, generating a never-to-be-forgotten atmosphere.

To be honest, the standard of rugby wasn’t always great. Many a key game was decided by a penalty goal or a rare opportunist try. Did that matter to the supporters of Cork Constitution or Garryowen, Dolphin or Young Munster, UCC or Bohemians? Not in the slightest. It was all about winning the cup and how you did it was purely incidental.

Club loyalty frequently ran out of control and fist fights weren’t always confined to the combatants on the pitch. Referees had to be brave and prepared to take abuse from just about every quarter. Bill Twomey, later a distinguished RTÉ broadcaster, undertook the task on many occasions before the Second World War. Paddy D’Arcy of international fame was the whistler on a record six occasions while the current president of the Munster Branch, Stan Fuller, took charge of the finals in 1984 and ’85.

“In a refereeing sense, you felt you had become a man when you were appointed to handle a Munster Cup match,” he recalled.

“I began in 1979 and of course I was often nervous on the days before but it was also very enjoyable during and after the game. Of course, we made mistakes but I think people were more understanding back in those days. Nowadays, they have television and video and can scrutinise every decision.

“My first final was the game between Young Munster and Waterpark in ’84. I also refereed Munsters in the Junior Cup final that year which they also won. In 1985, Cork Con beat Shannon in the final and I had to send a Con player off. It’s something you don’t like doing in a final but you do it without thinking.”

Stan speaks with no little nostalgia of the crowds at the cup matches through the years all the way up to the beginning of the 1990s, when the advent of the All-Ireland League changed everything. And he also believes the reason the southern clubs dominated the league in the early years was due to “the strength of character” they had built up through all those mighty battles chasing that coveted cup medal.

Fuller puts it succinctly when he says that today “it seems they are using the Charity Cups to get ready for the cup and the cup to prepare for the AIL”.

The clubs can complain all they like about how interest in the cup has been allowed to dwindle to such a low ebb that the vast majority of fans in the province are hardly aware that this season’s competition kicks off this weekend.

The truth is that each and every one of them signed up for the league and in the process virtually tossed the cup on to the scrap heap. A few have actually withdrawn altogether over the past few years lest their league prospects were harmed. And it was the clubs who decided that cup games should be played concurrently on the same day on club grounds rather than Branch headquarters at Musgrave and Thomond with the inevitable further diminution in prestige and interest.

“I remember being in Musgrave Park a couple of years ago when Dolphin were playing Young Munster and Sundays Well and Waterpark at the same time on back pitches with no more than 200 people present”, says Stan Fuller. “There was a time when the cup was the climax to the season, now it’s over and done with by Christmas.”

When I suggested that some of the blame attached to the Branch for allowing such a regrettable situation to develop, he argued there was little they could do about it because this is what the clubs had voted for.

And he also ruefully accepted that “the AIL begins in two weeks’ time and goes on and on from there along with the RaboDirect and the Heineken Cup and so the dates for the cup simply aren’t available.”

Like it or not, the Munster Cup’s greatest days are long gone and it’s hardly likely we will ever see their like again.