When red meets blue, friendship goes out the window

Convention tells us that, for 80 minutes at Lansdowne Road this evening, men who are good friends and teammates on international weeks will put aside their friendships and substitute them with animosities born of blood.

That may be but it is hard not to think that for the likes of Donncha O’Callaghan and Brian O’Driscoll there must be an element of comfort in the sight of the grizzled old vet in the trench opposite.

Winning may be everything in sports but simply taking part is something which all players – no matter their age – should still appreciate, not least the professionals wearing red and blue in a Dublin suburb this evening.

A recent study may have claimed the rate of injuries suffered by rugby players has not increased significantly since the switch from amateurism, but that is little comfort to those so grievously affected by them. Had things been different, Munster may well have been able to call on the likes of Jerry Flannery, Denis Leamy and David Wallace this evening.

Leinster have lost the likes of John Fogarty, Trevor Hogan, Shane Horgan and Ian McKinley prematurely in recent times. McKinley’s is perhaps the ultimate cautionary tale given he was just 21 when a nasty eye injury forced the out-half to clear out his locker 14 months ago as he was beginning to make inroads into the senior squad.

It is an issue which exercises the mind of every professional sports person and one which the Irish Rugby Union Players Association (IRUPA) has been addressing in greater detail in recent years under Niall Woods and his successor as CEO Omar Hassanein. IRUPA now offers a range of services such as advice on taxation, pensions, career development planning which are designed to lessen the turbulence felt by players descending from the altitude of pro rugby to the grounded reality of being an everyday member of the public.

“It’s different for a 20 or 21-year-old guy who, hopefully, is going to be doing a trade, a diploma or degree and is going to be educating himself,” says Leinster’s Shane Jennings. “For guys in the game a while and out of the real world, we have to upskill and try and learn how that world works.”

If anything, such services will take on greater significance given today’s players are not entering the professional game via the ‘real world’ as those pioneers did when the game first opened its door to the paid ranks.

To that end, IRUPA has recently started to partner Ireland’s professional rugby players with personal mentors in the business world and a similar initiative was launched earlier this week when the association teamed up with another partner.

Boardmatch Ireland provides a web-based service where people register their interest in volunteering on not-for-profit boards and candidates are matched to not-for-profit organisations who have also registered their board opportunities. Half-a-dozen matches have already been made including those involving Jennings (Ronald McDonald House), Eoin Reddan (the Irish Youth Foundation) and Marcus Horan (The Limerick Hub) and the benefits flow in both directions.

“It’s a win-win scenario with guys gaining the experience of being in a directorship type of role but equally the boards gain from their experiences,” says Hassanein. “We underestimate how valuable our players can be in life after rugby. If you take someone like Leo Cullen, who is Leinster captain, he has skills in the area of leadership. Some he was naturally born with and others he has acquired but those types of skills are hugely transferrable.”

Exactly 72% of the Leinster squad and 70% of their opponents this evening are already involved in some sort of charity work while a whole host spend their days off during the week poring over textbooks and completing college assignments and McKinley’s unfortunate tale is proof that it is never to soon to do so. “People think you have a very busy schedule (as a rugby player),” said Jennings jokingly at the Boardmatch launch this week, “but we probably don’t. We are pretty sheltered in rugby and it is great to get out and see these organisations, how they run and deal with real life.”