‘You want me to name the guys we’re after?’

WHILE professionalism is now well entrenched in rugby, John Kelly’s role for Munster Rugby has progressed from a decade as a paid player until the Ireland wing’s retirement in 2007 to that of a volunteer, albeit one a chair of a PGC responsible for the recruitment and retention of players as well as the hiring of the coaching staff.

This past week’s kerfuffle over JJ Hanrahan’s future has underlined the difficulties facing the Irish provinces in retaining some of their brightest assets when French and English clubs are luring them overseas with lucrative contract offers. Kelly and his committee, which also numbers Munster chief executive Garrett Fitzgerald, head coach Anthony Foley, team manager Niall O’Donovan, past branch presidents John Hartery and Denis Kelliher and former Shannon and Munster forward Andrew Thompson, also have find a way to successfully negotiate the increasingly complex global transfer market in search of that elusive marquee signing.

It’s all a far cry from the late 1990s when young Kelly was making his way in the game as a fledgling pro.

“Negotations take time, there’s a lot of back and forth and every player has an agent now,” Kelly explains. “In my day it was very simple, you walked into a room, were given your contract, you signed it and walked out the other door! There were probably five individual contracts and then 25 specific contracts of ‘you’re getting this much and that’s it.’ And there was no negotiation. No clauses or anything like that, you just walked in and signed it.

“Now, and rightly so, you have to deal with each person individually and it can take a bit of time and that’s why it happens very early now. There is a lot of work in it and for me the PGC is a voluntary role. I give time to it and a reasonable amount of time to it at this stage, so if I was to get involved in negotiations, I’d get fired from my real job.”

Ah yes, the real job. Kelly, 40, has just made a transfer of his own, joining accountancy firm Grant Thornton as their director of audit in Cork, heading up a new unit with the aim of developing the company’s audit offering. That’s quite a handful in itself let alone the demands of the Munster PGC.

“You’d aim for at least a monthly meeting of the full PGC, but then you might have to meet three times a month depending on something that arises. I would structure it so it would not affect my work but you’re on the phone to committee members I would say every day, to be honest – I never told Grant Thornton that in the interview!

“There’s time involved in it and I do it as a volunteer, but it’s something I’m very interested in and I’m passionate about Munster, it was 10 years of my life and to be able to give something back now in that capacity is just something that I couldn’t refuse. I really enjoy it and while you’re very much in the background you do feel very much a part of it. I’d say a lot of the younger guys on the squad wouldn’t even know who I am but that’s fine too. Anonymity is okay, I’m reasonably comfortable with that.”

While Munster’s players and coaching staff are operating very much in the present as they prepare to try and reverse last Saturday’s disappointing Champions Cup home loss to Clermont Auvergne at Stade Marcel Michelin tomorrow, Kelly and the PGC’s drive to recruit and retain the strongest possible squad means they are already striving to sign overseas players for next season when a number of players from the southern hemisphere are expected to become available after the World Cup in England.

To Munster fans brought up on a diet of a largely indigenous team augmented by world-class overseas signings such as John Langford, Jean de Villiers, Jim Williams and Doug Howlett, the holy grail is for their province to sign the next world-beater, but while Kelly does not rule that out, he points to some serious obstacles in reaching that objective and says Munster have been frustrated by recent efforts. Signing a marquee player, he insists is not for the lack of trying.

“I think there’s a perception out there, sometimes, that’s ‘well, why don’t we go out and get a marquee signing, say an All Black?’ The biggest challenge is ‘well, which All Black do you want?’

I would have sat outside and said ‘we need a big name, you need to sign Christian Cullen or Jim Williams’. It’s actually when you go looking for those players you realise the availability of a player of that calibre only comes around every so often and also the market has completely changed in the last few years. New Zealand players and South Africans, in particular, were underpaid so you could get a player like Christian Cullen.

“Now the market has been so inflated by the French, they’re paying such big amounts for players, and also you have New Zealand and South Africa paying guys better and retaining their players. We’re hearing lots of stories about the All Blacks going into the World Cup and being retained post-World Cup. Trying to get those guys out of that is very difficult now.”

Throw in the assessment of whether that player is the right fit for Foley’s squad, whether he complies with the criteria laid down by the IRFU policy for Leinster, Munster and Ulster on recruiting Non-Irish Qualified players and the matter of whether he is actually better than what is already on your roster, and that wish list of players can be reduced considerably.

“Are Munster going to sign a marquee player? I would hope so and despite all the challenges that are out there that is what Munster are aiming towards, looking to sign a player who’ll come in and will add value in a major way.

“Will it happen for definite? Because of the challenges I’ve explained and the market the way it is and the availability of guys — that New Zealand, South Africa and Australia don’t want to give up their players — because of all those challenges, it’s very difficult but that would certainly be the desire within Munster as well, to actually sign those guys.”

Waiting until after the World Cup for the recruitment to begin is another misnomer. Munster have already tried and failed to sign two experienced All Blacks.

“That bunfight has started,” he says bluntly. “It started four or five months ago. If you tried to go after a big-name signing just after the World Cup, they’re all spoken for and long gone, either signed up by their home unions or in a club in Europe. So the process is ongoing.

“I would have felt a sense of frustration sometimes about the players who weren’t coming in. When I was there (playing) we had Christian Cullen and Jim Williams come in, guys who had fantastic careers and were proven internationals and you wanted to see one or two of those coming into Munster, but it’s a lot harder to get them now than it was when Jim and Christian came in.

“Missed out on? I won’t name them, it’s too sensitive a thing really. What I would say is we’ve gone to the level of discussions with internationals who’ve 40 or 50 caps with the All Blacks, trying to get them and getting almost to the stage of ‘well, are you ready to talk to us, to actually look at this seriously?’ and guys have just decided, maybe for a family reason – well, there definitely was a family reason — why they wanted to stay in their home union. So, coming in with a realistic financial offer that would tempt these guys away (is one thing) but there’s other small things and in those two cases it was a family reason. And those were guys who had played in the Rugby Championship with over 40 caps. Unfortunately, we missed out on them and one of them was fairly recently for post-World Cup.

“That’s frustrating and disappointing but you go back to the drawing board and try and find the next best available option. However there does come a point where you just change your strategy completely because you’ve worked through the couple of next best available options and you’re down to, ‘well, is this guy really better than what we have anyway?’ So then we might look to a project player who’s going to develop after four or five years into a world-class player. That’s the way it has worked.

“You still want me to name a guy we’re after, don’t you,” Kelly says with a smile, “but I’m not going to.”