Andy is a good man but his face doesn’t fit with the South Dublin lads.
I’d say they’ll throw him under the bus soon.
The IRFU are unwittingly leading rugby away from being a mainstream sport. The team is made of lads from 3 schools within a half mile of each other, a scattering foreign lads and a few more token lads from the other 3 provinces. Moving to pay per view tv will finish it off.
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I think that might be a factor although the schools are putting huge resources in to getting and enveloping players . Also very little of the provinces on terrestrial tv these days
I was just thinking the same thing myself.
The big thing with the drop off in hype/interest in rugby is RTE losing most of the TV rights.
When rugby football mania was at its peak the Montrose PR machine gleefully fueled the hyperbole.
Heineken Cup matches were all live to the masses as the state broadcaster had the games, you had the cheerleading of Munster fans travelling in their hundreds of thousands around the globe to places like Cardiff and the south of France, you had the George Hook and McGurk panto show, there was beating England at Croke Park and “maturing as a nation”, the friendly victories against weaken Southern Hemisphere teams in November - all this tied in with the Celtic Tiger as the country was awash with moola.
Now, RTE have lost pretty much all the rights. Munster beat some crowd in France in December, apparently their best result in years, but it was hardly mentioned in the days after (admittedly it was competing with the All-Ireland hurling final so everything was dwarfed by that). They’ve lost the 6 Nations now too. On top of this the international team continues to flop at World Cups, the grassroots is dead, the concussion situation isn’t going away. All in all a catastrophic time for rugby football over here.
Hopefully Al Jazeera or Amazon Prime win the rights to the 6 Nations to really put the tin hat on it.
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Is that true?
I don’t know, they have the family bandwagon and crucially wimmin who are still (pretending to be) engrossed in it.
Where else can the wagon go, they’ll fire on the county jersey in the summer for a few weeks but have no interest in a trip to Carlow in February, the soccer team is a bad joke and mindlessly boring so that’s no draw, there’s nothing else to draw them from the team of us
I’d say this is the fifteenth or sixteenth time rugby has been declared dead on TFK since the turn of the century
Sure wel see
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It’s amazing how threatened lads are of other sports. I’ll never ever understand it. Surely to god you shouldn’t care what other people watch or enjoy. It’s like being angry because somebody prefers steak and chips to pasta carbonara.
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Other than the hurling championship there has been wake enough interest in any sport since this whole Covid thing started really. This is GGA country.
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Nobody past Kilkenny gives a fuck about hurling mate
Loads more people watched the football final and more again watch the English football team in a big game
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It’s gas. A lot of the same lads would pick a good wedding over an all ireland semi final for example. So liqueur is first… Then their ‘beloved county’ then some EPL team, then the next priory is praying another sport fails
It’s absolutely gas
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Being perfectly honest there was fuck all interest in the hurling championship as well. Sport without fans is fairly shite.
I rewatched the all Ireland semi final with Galway and at times it was like a challenge game. It simply isn’t the same product.
I just don’t get why lads so worked up over rugby. Munster maintained a fairly decent following throughout the worst recession in decades and kept limerick city ticking over with big crowds 4 or 5 times a winter.
Everyone has different interests and that’s just the way it is.
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Without a doubt.
I didn’t even know the English had a football team this year. Which province did they play in?
Just watch and play whatever you enjoy would be my advice. We are all different.
More lies
You’d want to be in a seriously bad place mentally to get worked over a sport you hate. Everyone has different interests. Just get on with it.