The Rugby Thread (Part 2)

[BruidheanChaorthainn]

@glasagusban

I was listening to some suit from Leinster on the radio a while back talking about the RDS redevelopment and how they are “adapting their offering” to attract younger generations who “want to be entertained” and “expect to see cheerleaders and a range of other entertainment”.

No different to the painful music they started playing at gaa games.

[endakenny]

@BruidheanChaorthainn

@endakenny

Rubby is played seriously in less than 20 schools and approx 80 clubs in the whole of Munster. Granted a lot of this is due to the nature of the sport but It is not a serious participation sport compared to Hurling, Football and soccer.

Rubby is grand for a Saturday night in November when your looking for an excuse to get out to the boozer, that’s it’s main selling point.

I dunno who you think is turning up in pissing rain to sink pints at rugby ground in November.

Television viewership is through the roof for rugby as well.

You’ve gaa club players afraid to play in April and may because the pitches are too wet according to lads on here meanwhile rugby has proven you can grow sport and all you get is sneery comments.

Hurling is max taken seriously in 12 counties and parts of those counties have no interest.

You know the point I’m making, rubby is a grand event especially during the winter months when the GAA stops.

They know this and cash in on meaningless games at Xmas (provinces) and November (internationals) due to their marketing efforts plus the fact that many in the upper echelons of society of this country big up these events.

The knockout stages of the URC should be a serious sporting occasion but Munster can’t sell out Thomond as it doesn’t suit people’s social schedule and very few actually care about Munster v Cardiff blues.

[glasagusban]

Thankfully GAA is too fast to play it after every score. I hated the introduction of music at the final whistle in finals and now other games in croke park. All it does is drown out the crowd noise and atmosphere.

[BruidheanChaorthainn]

@endakenny

@BruidheanChaorthainn

@endakenny

Rubby is played seriously in less than 20 schools and approx 80 clubs in the whole of Munster. Granted a lot of this is due to the nature of the sport but It is not a serious participation sport compared to Hurling, Football and soccer.

Rubby is grand for a Saturday night in November when your looking for an excuse to get out to the boozer, that’s it’s main selling point.

I dunno who you think is turning up in pissing rain to sink pints at rugby ground in November.

Television viewership is through the roof for rugby as well.

You’ve gaa club players afraid to play in April and may because the pitches are too wet according to lads on here meanwhile rugby has proven you can grow sport and all you get is sneery comments.

Hurling is max taken seriously in 12 counties and parts of those counties have no interest.

You know the point I’m making, rubby is a grand event especially during the winter months when the GAA stops.

They know this and cash in on meaningless games at Xmas (provinces) and November (internationals) due to their marketing efforts plus the fact that many in the upper echelons of society of this country big up these events.

The knockout stages of the URC should be a serious sporting occasion but Munster can’t sell out Thomond as it doesn’t suit people’s social schedule and very few actually care about Munster v Cardiff blues.

Munster and Leinster sell lots of season tickets don’t forget.

Rugby went the way the gaa has gone now but it is rowing back. A lot more free to air games. The biggest issue with rugby now is the season is too long. September in June and invariably you’ve only six days to sell the tickets for the knock out fixture.

That is woeful scheduling.

I think very few really care at gaa games too. Most counties have huge bandwagons when they start winning. Rugby is no different.

[BruidheanChaorthainn]

@glasagusban

Thankfully GAA is too fast to play it after every score. I hated the introduction of music at the final whistle in finals and now other games in croke park. All it does is drown out the crowd noise and atmosphere.

Agree rating but lads love to hit rugby with this sort of stuff.

The president of Real Madrid said he’d prefer if football was 60 minutes long because young people have such short attention spans nowadays.

That had me thinking hurling should be the ideal sport to grow because the plays are so quick.

[the_man_himself]

I think rubby and GAA can easily coexist. The biggest rubby county in Ireland is selling out every hurling match they have. Every rubby man on here outside Dublin is also a GAA man

[binkybarnes]

@BruidheanChaorthainn

The ignorance of the gaa folk at times is incredible. Irish rugby is a lot more popular than thirty years ago and you’ve folk sneering at them for it.

Rugby is more popular than it was 30 years ago but less popular than it was 20 years ago. The Heineken cup was way more popular than watever the current incarnation is. Maybe its my age but todays rugby stars are far less interesting or engaging. O Driscoll, O Gara, O Connell etc were way easier to warm to and were way bigger stars than anybody currently playing.

[BruidheanChaorthainn]

@binkybarnes

@BruidheanChaorthainn

The ignorance of the gaa folk at times is incredible. Irish rugby is a lot more popular than thirty years ago and you’ve folk sneering at them for it.

Rugby is more popular than it was 30 years ago but less popular than it was 20 years ago. The Heineken cup was way more popular than watever the current incarnation is. Maybe its my age but todays rugby stars are far less interesting or engaging. O Driscoll, O Gara, O Connell etc were way easier to warm to and were way bigger stars than anybody currently playing.

Most of that because is rugby went behind a paywall like the gaa is doing now but thankfully that is changing and it’s back on free to air a lot more.

[myboyblue]

@BruidheanChaorthainn

It’s an absolute scandal how little hurling is played in the country.

Hurling is played nearly every single day of the week in the vast majority of counties and certainly in the counties that want to play it. I know you like to wind up, but try better.

[myboyblue]

@endakenny

Rubby is played seriously in less than 20 schools and approx 80 clubs in the whole of Munster. Granted a lot of this is due to the nature of the sport but It is not a serious participation sport compared to Hurling, Football and soccer.

Rubby is grand for a Saturday night in November when your looking for an excuse to get out to the boozer, that’s it’s main selling point.

Rugby is a minority sport and barely tolerated and certainly not played to any great degree or number by a huge amount of the population. Its marketed very well at the “club” level, but thats about it really.

[Cheasty]

@LionelRitchie

Please expand

Argentina doesn’t have a top level club competition. Their players all have to play in Europe. They had a Super Rugby franchise for a couple of years but the competition effectively collapsed. That’s what I mean when I say it’s in “no man’s land”.

@LionelRitchie

Can you citr recent examples please?

@LionelRitchie

Again, any evidenc3?

While afl is making inroads, its nrl absorbing unions nursery.

I know your love for afl but i dont think youre correct in thinking its absorbing union’s nursery of gps schools.

Nrl has never been stronger. While union has tried to cherry pick nrls most marketable as theyve done in the past, nrl no longer has to make shrewd targets. Wallabies are walking across the codes without much coaxing.

The expense of Aru arrogance is being laid bare.

As an aside, freddy fitlers kid signed with union this week. Was pitched as tho hed a dilemma and went union. Truth is, he wasnt up to scratch to make nrl. Name of more value to a union team than even wooden spooners of league. Chasm only growing

The Waratahs’ average attendance is around 12k. It was nearly 20k a decade ago. The competition they play in is dying, they finished bottom of it this year.

Rugby Union football in Australia only has the Cadbury Wallabies as a major selling point, and even then, outside of the World Cup and maybe the Lions once every 12 years, the public are only interested in the New Zealand games, and they don’t even sell out now. 68k at last week’s one. The more batterings the team takes, and they’re taking a lot of batterings lately, the more the dagger is twisted in the heart of the sport.

The Swans crowd as far as I can see is mainly a middle class one drawn from the Eastern suburbs and relatively near inner northern and western suburbs (though the Swans as an entity is attractive to the whole of Sydney). That’s the rugby union heartland. Going to the SCG to see the Swans is very attractive for families or as a precursor to a night out. Sydney is producing its own AFL players now and my understanding is Aussie Rules has made good inroads into the traditional schools which produced rugby union players. The Swans team tomorrow has a proper core of star players from around the Sydney/near Sydney area. Heeney, Gulden, Blakey, Mills (even if he’s out, he’s the club captain). AFL is very attractive to the corporate set. The Swans drew an average home attendance of 39k this year and it would be bigger if the SCG held more.

NRL will probably always be king in Sydney especially Western Sydney where the GWS Giants will have a much harder time making a success of themselves as club. But for all NRL’s popularity the attendances it attracts on a weekly basis are poor. 50k was the largest crowd it attracted during the home and away season this year and that was in Brisbane. Games at the Sydney Football Stadium or the Olympic Stadium, even finals usually have sparse attendances and are very poor spectacles. Outside of State Of Origin and the Grand Final NRL it doesn’t have many “events”. It’s strength is the old school shithole grounds like Brookvale Oval and Leichardt Oval. But overall it has an image problem as being a bogan sport.

The AFL is Australia’s equivalent of the Premier League or the NFL, it’s the dominant sports league in Australia. It’s national and it packs the crowds in everywhere. You just don’t get 70k-90k going to NRL home and away games on a regular basis like you do in AFL. Crowds create interest, they create spectacle and make children want to play the sport.

I think NRL is even more ingrained in Queensland than it is in New South Wales but there’s a similar dynamic going on with AFL in Brisbane too. The Lions are a very attractive proposition across the board in terms of potential spectators, sponsors and getting children into the sport, everything.

If you don’t have that major professional league in your country - and worse if you have rival major professional leagues in other sports - and rugby union football in Australia has both of these problems - you will always have a problem, because you don’t have anything to bridge the interest gap and the player production gap to the international game where the main interest is.

[Cheasty]

@endakenny

Rubby is played seriously in less than 20 schools and approx 80 clubs in the whole of Munster. Granted a lot of this is due to the nature of the sport but It is not a serious participation sport compared to Hurling, Football and soccer.

Rubby is grand for a Saturday night in November when your looking for an excuse to get out to the boozer, that’s it’s main selling point.

Maybe but in America, I’d guess American football has terrible participation numbers, pretty much nobody plays it beyond school and yet the sport still dominates America.

[Cheasty]

@BruidheanChaorthainn

A lot of gaa people don’t want the sport to be popular. It’s beneath them to try and grow the game.

You only have to look at a lot of the posts here by the split season zealot purity brigade to know this is true. There’s a mean, miserable, xenophobic streak running through it all.

“Events” and people who attend them are sneered at.

The health of a sport depends a lot on events. It always will. The GAA seems determined to remove any semblance of an “event” from its calendar. It’s complete suicide.

[BruidheanChaorthainn]

@Cheasty

@BruidheanChaorthainn

A lot of gaa people don’t want the sport to be popular. It’s beneath them to try and grow the game.

You only have to look at a lot of the posts here by the split season zealot purity brigade to know this is true. There’s a mean, miserable, xenophobic streak running through it all.

“Events” and people who attend them are sneered at.

The health of a sport depends a lot on events. It always will. The GAA seems determined to remove any semblance of an “event” from its calendar. It’s complete suicide.

Give it a few years they’ll learn the hard way.

[Cheasty]

@endakenny

Rubby have really bought into the social element of sport and turned their games into an “event” rather than a match.

I have numerous friends who attend GAA games and once or twice a year some of them will go to some rubby match. The rubby match is posted on their socials as it’s seen in the same breath as EP or a concert. It’s seen as fun and hip, none of these care about the actual game but it’s a grand day out in Dublin or Cork followed by a night out. It can be planned months in advance so you’ve a hotel booked for the night out afterwards also.

GAA is none of the above social things, they don’t help themselves with lack of promotion or playing games in half empty stadia either. It’s why the Munster championship is the only GAA equivalent as it is both an event & a serious sporting competition.

There is no reason why a Railway cup type competition shouldn’t fill Croke park with a bit of marketing.

The GAA used to be all of these things, and very recently too.

[gilgamboa]

@binkybarnes

Ye moaned long and hard when you were not allowed in.

Who is ye

[myboyblue]

Cork

[the_man_himself]

NRL has higher television audiences I think. Could be off here but with a large part of the NRL base being bogans as you say, I’d imagine the lower crowds could be because of proximity to the stadiums and having less disposable income than AFL fans.

I think the Swans crowd is probably quite similar to a rugby crowd at home, middle class, good for families and few people care that much about the result

[LionelRitchie]

@Cheasty

That’s what I mean when I say it’s in “no man’s land”.

Theyve beaten the all blacks and springboks in recent weeks. If thats no man’s land, wed be delighted to be inhabitants

Watching storm dismantle roosters, will come back to you on other stuff

[Cheasty]

@the_man_himself

NRL has higher television audiences I think. Could be off here but with a large part of the NRL base being bogans as you say, I’d imagine the lower crowds could be because of proximity to the stadiums and having less disposable income than AFL fans.

I think the Swans crowd is probably quite similar to a rugby crowd at home, middle class, good for families and few people care that much about the result

NRL teams in Sydney all have their own shithole home stadiums with lower capacities at which they play most of their matches. These are mostly way out in the sticks.

The two “neutral” venues in Sydney, the Sydney Football Stadium and the Olympic Stadium, both have a couple of problems in terms of attracting crowds. The NRL heartland in Western Sydney is a long way away from the city centre where the Sydney Football Stadium is - Penrith is probably 40 miles out - and it’s awkward and annoying to get there. The Olympic stadium is soulless and lonely and people don’t want to go there. That’s a problem the GWS Giants have as well.

With AFL in Melbourne, the heartlands from which the teams take their names - Collingwood, Carlton, Richmond, Hawthorn etc., these are all “inner” suburbs pretty much a stone’s throw from Melbourne city centre. In Dublin terms it would be like Phibsborough, Drumcondra, Ringsend, Ranelagh etc.

All the Melbourne AFL games now take place at either the MCG or the Docklands stadium which are both in or near the city centre and it makes them easy to access. While Melbourne is a highly spread out city, its geography is more radial than Sydney’s and the MCG has always been seen as “the home of football”. NRL in Sydney never really had that same sort of “Mecca” of a stadium. It does in Brisbane with Lang Park (Suncorp Stadium).

There was a nice juxtaposition last week where the Swans were playing Port Adelaide at a sold out SCG while simultaneously next door Cronulla were playing North Queensland Cowboys in front of a sparse attendance at the Sydney Football Stadium in what was effectively an NRL quarter-final knockout tie.