General Rugby Discussion 3

Im glad Italy are in and yes, they play a nice game which I hope they can built to consistently compete. But they're still a long way off that, even with a couple of pro teams competing at the highest level. Rugby has also moved on, the top teams are very very good and the prospect of Portugal or Germany or Georgia getting there without first building a strong domestic game are tiny.

defo a challenge, but ABs saw 40k show up in Sam Diego a few weeks ago. How many would they/ireland/England/SA get once every few years in Lisbon or Munich? If that’s not viable then the notion of promoting these teams to a higher level seems even more remote.

No suggesting it should happen, I'd just like to watch it.

For the 6N, let the top 2 Pacific island teams play each other over 2 legs. Winner plays in the 6N that year, based in Europe (Belgium was often suggested when they talked about Argentina joining the 6N).

They'd be everyone's second team and the money would be a boost to the Pacific island teams.

The Pacific teams must be the vest value for money teams in the world. Samoa has the population of Cork city and tiny resources and make a decent team. They'd be dangerous with half the resources of Ireland.

Schools rugby in Ireland is very very regional, and while extremely popular in certain small pockets, probably isn't as representative of wider rugby support in the country as it might be in SA.

All four provinces will have a Schools cup competition, and most tend to be played in the provincial ground with a final around St Patrick's Day roughly in March, and will almost always pull in a pretty good crowd.

The dominant schools in both Leinster & Munster tend to be private (fee-paying) schools. This isn't really the case in Connacht (don't think there are any/many private schools outside of grinds schools) and Ulster.

The Leinster Schools Cup Final will be played in the RDS, and in recent years has pulled in crowds of 10k-15k for the game, depending on the schools involved. Don't think it's quite as large as that in the other provinces but others will be better informed and could comment more closely.

It gets a good level of coverage in sporting media (probably disproportionate to the actual amount of people who care about it I'm in being honest), and amongst rugby anoraks (like the people on this forum for example) people would follow it quite closely because it is still an enormous pathway for players moving into professional rugby.

Similar to the big South African schools - the best rugby schools in Ireland are extremely well funded and have excellent facilities. An awful lot of Irish rugby stars of the past 20 years have gone to a very small number of schools i.e. Blackrock College in Leinster (Brian O'Driscoll, Leo Cullen, Caelan Doris, Garry Ringrose, Hugo Keena etc), PBC in Cork (Ronan O'Gara, Peter O'Mahony, Peter Stringer, Simon Zebo), RBAI in Ulster, and a handful of others historically very prominent.

I looked at this again very recently and think of the c. 234 professional rugby players across the four Irish provinces (and including their academies), 20% of those players attended either Blackrock College (which must be one of the biggest professional rugby player producing schools in the world) or St Michael's College, two schools that are about 3km away from each other in a relatively small pocket of South Dublin.

it’s hard to know without seeing it happen but how many punters do you need in Spain/Germany to make a match financially viable? On the A tournament thing I think that would work domestically for tier 2 countries, would Irish/English fans ravel for an A match, not sure but how many are needed to make it viable and how long to generate the tv audience to build it up? For me if WR are committed to building the game and the options are adding teams to the 6N or developing a serious T2 comp with the likes of Ireland France and England involved thru A teams, the latter seems more likely to succeed.

I'm surprised the senior cup final is only pulling in circa 10k attendance these days. I remember going to finals in Lansdowne Road in the mid 2000s and the entire lower tier was usually pretty full, but that was back in the Celtic Tiger era I guess. Peak Ross O'Carroll Kelly fever for schools rugby in Dublin anyway.

edit: a quick google is suggesting back then attendance used to be circa 25,000, but its now more recently in the 10k-15k range due to moving to the RDS and TV coverage.