So what have we missed in the last 174 days?

O2 Challenge 31/7/2010 Connacht/Munster vs Leinster/Ulster An Aerial view of the Aviva Stadium during the first match to be played there. Mandatory Credit ©INPHO/Norman McCloskey

The wait is almost over. At long last, 174 days after an Irish province heard the full-time whistle and the sport was thrown into darkness, Leinster and Munster will this evening get rugby on this island back up on its feet and carry it into a brave and strange new world.

When Connacht put the tin hat on a 29-19 victory over the Southern Kings in Port Elizabeth back on March 1, few of us could have imagined it would be the last we would see of our professional teams for almost six months.

We all knew trouble was afoot, that a novel coronavirus, Covid-19 we thought we’d heard it called, was heading west from China and causing untold damage to people’s health and family lives, their wellbeing and their pockets as economies shut down and societies went into lockdown.

In a rugby sense, the pandemic reaching northern Italy was the first harbinger of bad things to come as Benetton in Treviso and Zebre in Parma saw their fixtures cancelled in late February.

Munster were participants in the last Guinness PRO14 game on Italian soil when they faced Michael Bradley’s Zebre in a suburb of Milan on February 21, departing the city’s airport in the nick of time before the north of the country was quarantined. 

Italy played their Six Nations game with Scotland further south in Rome the following day and 24 hours after that Ireland succumbed to an English bulldozer at Twickenham. 

It took another week for the championship to follow suit and suspend the competition, although Italy would not play again, their March 7 trip to Dublin to face Andy Farrell’s bruised and battered team postponed. Not that that stopped hundreds of Italians making the trip to the capital anyway, just as thousands of Irish people were packing their bags for the coming week’s Cheltenham Festival.

Such innocent times. For Irish rugby, the reality was about to bite although the IRFU was already preparing for the economic downtime as it counted the cost of the postponed home game. As quickly as matches were called off, the sense of alarm at lost coffers increased on a parallel axis. 

It was like cascading dominoes, the PRO14 season and Irish domestic rugby both suspended on March 12, then all French rugby gone a day later, and Super Rugby in the southern hemisphere a day after that. Europe’s Heineken Champions Cup was next, on March 16, the same day as the RFU pulled the shutters down on all rugby in England. And on it went.

When the PRO14 was suspended indefinitely on March 19, Irish rugby battened down the hatches and prepared for the economic tsunami.

No matches meant no income, from spectators, broadcasters or sponsors, and that spelled trouble. The following day, March 20, saw professional representative body Rugby Players Ireland agree a pay deferral with employers, the IRFU, ranging from 10 to 50 per cent depending on salary and those journalists lucky enough to still be employed started writing nostalgia pieces in the absence of actual sport.

26/02/2020 Chief Executive of the Irish Rugby Football Union (IRFU) Philip Browne. Photo: Gareth Chaney/Collins

When real news began to break once more, it made for pretty grim reading. IRFU chief executive Philip Browne broke cover in May and spoke starkly of revenues falling off a cliff and the dangers of the sport returning behind closed doors for an extended period of time. 

With Test rugby the top-down revenue generator for Irish rugby, an inability to complete Ireland’s Six Nations campaign or play home games during the November Test window would be catastrophic, costing the governing body €15-20 million, while Browne warned he was spending tomorrow’s money today just to keep the organisation afloat.

Lucky for rugby and all Irish sport, the general public were doing their bit for the country and abiding by the rules of an unprecedented lockdown. Confirmed Covid cases began to fall and restrictions began to ease, with the four professional provinces given the green light to return to training on June 22.

Nine weeks later, the protocols adhered to at High Performance Centres from Limerick to Belfast and Dublin to Galway and all four provinces are set to converge on Aviva Stadium as PRO14 battle recommences with only one positive case of Covid-19 among the 915 players and IRFU staff members tested between June and last Monday.

Rugby supporters will continue to be missing from the stands for the time being and will be conspicuous by their absence, particularly at the next two week’s interprovincial fixtures to which they would normally be vocal and passionate contributors.

Yet just the sheer fact of being able to watch Irish rugby stars in action once more this evening should ease their disappointment, as Leinster head coach Leo Cullen acknowledged yesterday following his team announcement.

Tommy O'Brien, watched by head coach Leo Cullen during Leinster Rugby squad training at UCD in Dublin. Photo by Ramsey Cardy/Sportsfile

"It is a huge occasion, we will all miss the supporters on the day because they make the occasions incredibly special,” Cullen said. “But I'm dying to get going now because the training is all very well but what we really want is to see the fruits of our labour on the field and see what that all looks like coming together.

“We can train against each other but we don't know how that's going to translate into playing against an opposition. I can't wait now, it's going to be a very unusual day out with all the different bits that are going on in terms of social distancing on the sideline. We just need to make sure everyone's doing their piece to make sure it's as safe as possible.

"An incredible amount of work has gone on behind the scenes to get us to this point and I guess for us as players and the coaching staff, we've in many ways had to take a back seat in terms of people who have been working hard operationally and from a medical point of view to ensure things are as safe as possible, as safe as they can be. But, from our point of view, it's trying to get back to what we love doing which is preparing the team and for the players to actually get out there playing on the back of that preparation.

"I'm looking forward to it now. It's going to be a long wait even tomorrow. This week has dragged and dragged and dragged but it could be worse, it could be Sunday, I'd sooner be first out there."

The wait is nearly over and just imagine what we’ve been missing these past 175 days? A whole lot more, for sure, than the nuts and bolts and excitement of a conclusion to the 2020 Six Nations, the European club knockout stages and Ireland’s summer tour to Australia.

We have been denied Jordan Larmour's electric step, Andrew Conway’s blistering counter-attacking pace, and Garry Ringrose's perfectly balanced footwork. We have not seen the spring-heeled Peter O'Mahony stealing a lineout, nor Dave Kilcoyne barreling into contact. A Johnny Sexton drop goal has been noticeably absent, so too a Jacob Stockdale intercept and a crunching Bundee Aki hit.

Oh how we’ve missed the belligerence of a full-blooded breakdown tussle for dominance, the seismic rumble of a rolling maul, and the shuddering impact unleashed by the referee calling “engage”.

We haven’t heard a Nigel Owens one-liner in quite a while either, nor a pre-game rendition of Stand Up and Fight at Thomond Park, where that announcer who says “please respect the kicker” has fallen silent. So too the fella who tells you to “shhh!” as JJ Hanrahan or John Cooney lines up a kick at goal... when you’re in the pub.

The joy, the hurt, the tension, the release, we have missed it all, but not for much longer. Rugby is about to re-enter our lives and those lives will be better, healthier for the experience. Thank God for that.

Yet before we rush headlong into our long-anticipated feast of rugby, let us spare a thought for the likes of James Ryan, Joey Carbery, and the others of their rugby brotherhood forced to watch from the sidelines, denied by injury after so long a break from the game.

Leinster and Ireland lock Ryan is pushing to get back for next month’s Heineken Champions Cup quarter-final with Saracens having undergone a procedure on a shoulder following a training ground injury. As for Carbery, the Munster fly-half’s run of miserable luck just keeps on running, his troublesome ankle sidelining the playmaker indefinitely.

We will get our long-awaited fix soon enough. For them, though, the wait goes on.