Irish rugby’s professional journey a case of what might have been for Scotland
Friday evening matches being not much good for a Saturday column, I can only hope that Glasgow will have beaten Ulster to reach next week’s final.
The one thing for sure is that there will be at least one Irish team in the final at Celtic Park. Leinster may have lost the European Champions Cup to Saracens, being outmuscled and outwitted eventually, and Ireland may
club games together, and you can’t deny that Irish rugby is currently top of the northern hemisphere. Indeed one might add that Saracens coach, Mark Mccall, highly praised, even revered, by his players, and tipped by some to be Eddie Jones’ successor as England’s coach, is an Ulsterman from Bangor in County Down.
There have always been great Irish players of course. My memory goes back to Jackie Kyle, Ronnie Kavanagh and Tony O’reilly in the fifties, Kyle being also the star of the side that won Ireland’s first Grand Slam in 1947- 48, and there have been many very fine Ireland teams. The Irish contribution to the Lions has also been huge Kyle and O’reilly were both stars of Lions tours. Mike Gibson, Willie- John Mcbride, Brian O’driscoll and Paul O’connell were among the greatest of Lions. There was indeed a time when it seemed as if the first qualification for the Lions’ captaincy was to be Irish.
Nevertheless in the last quarter of the last century the
Telfer: Wanted game to be built on Provincial structure.
standard of Irish rugby was generally low. There were some great players and great days, notably Munster’s 1978 defeat of the All Blacks, and there were two Triple Crowns in the 198Os. But organisation was poor, the Inter- Provincial Championship badly supported. In the Five Nations, the Ireland team were rarely as fit as their opponents. It was generally believed that if you were level with Ireland after an hour you would win comfortably because the Irish pack would run out of steam. Few could doubt that in the 80s and the run- up to professionalism after the 1995 World Cup, rugby was in a far more healthy condition in Scotland than in Ireland. Nobody would say that