Ulster-Rugby-Matchday-Programme-Glasgow

New Season, New League,
Guest article:
Rod Nawn
New Hopes!
NOW the serious business of a new Ulster
rugby campaign begins in earnest, with a
new format and a new tournament name.
The United Rugby Championship is a
competition which is truly shaping a new
era for the game.
The Kingspan Stadium gates will admit up
to 15,000 eager spectators as the arena
edges closer still to capacity crowds, and
the bars and catering outlets will be open
for business as something like the normal
ebullience of a big rugby occasion takes
its grip.
Tonight’s welcome visitors, the Glasgow
Warriors, are traditional and formidably
consistent foes but, like their Kingspan
Stadium hosts this evening, the next eight
months will centre on a new 16-team league.
The arrival of the four strong South African
franchises transforms the prestige and the
challenge which faces the Scarlets, Leinster,
Cardiff and the rest of the sides with which
we have all become familiar.
The Bulls, Stormers, Lions and Sharks
have made a huge sporting and financial
decision to make the URC its home, leaving
Super Rugby behind and bulwarking the
reputation of the European tournament and
bringing some heavyweight rugby figures
to the competition.
One of them, remarkably, will be wearing
the white jersey of Ulster from November.
Duane Vermeulen, a World Cup winner
with the Springboks and currently in
wondrous form for his country in the Rugby
Championship - his display last weekend
against Australia whetting the fans’ appetite
to see this powerful intelligent back-rower
make Belfast his base until 2023.
His acquisition came out-of-the-blue,
lock Mick Kearney’s arrival in the summer
apparently the only notable addition to
the squad Head Coach Dan McFarland has
carefully assembled.
With Marcell Coetzee departing, the
breakaway group of players perhaps
required some more heft, but the deal
negotiated over many weeks by Bryn
Cunningham was nothing short of a coup.
In England and in France, particularly,
Vermeulen’s signature was greatly coveted,
Ulster’s ‘pitch’ proved to be the best!
Of course, it is the team, the group, which
succeeds or fails in its ambitions, but some
individual imports can, by the commitment
to the team ethos, lift those around them on
and off the pitch. Think Pienaar, Constable,
Muller, Piutau, Afoa and Payne, from abroad,
whose skillsets and presence aligned
perfectly with the more local harvest which
included David and Ian Humphreys, the
Best brothers, Trimble, Bowe, Ferris and
Henderson.
But tonight is very much about the present,
late September and the hopes and recurring
desire for winning and capturing that elusive
silverware. Both Ulster and Glasgow will be
well prepared for the sterling challenges
ahead, aware too of a URC format which
will take time for supporters to grasp but
with which coaches have fully absorbed.
For Ulster, for example, this is no simple
‘home-and-away’ fixture list, the nature of
a ‘Shield’ system means that all four Irish
Provinces will indeed play each other twice,
so too the South African newcomers and
the Welsh quartet. Nobody would question
that the Leinster, Munster, Connacht and
Ulster group is the most testing, the highquality
sides at the RDS, Thomond Park
and Sportsground strongholds of the game,
and certainly dominant in the league in its
previous incarnation as the PRO14.
So, the new league might initially appear
complex and certainly an even more
competitive calendar, and this evening’s sides
will be well aware of what promises to be a
daunting, if certainly compelling, campaign.
For Ulster, add the imminent Champions
Cup duels with Northampton and Clermont,
and it is a fixture list which will be savoured
by fans and relished by a squad which
has established players in the shape, for
instance, of Billy Burns and the marvel who
is John Cooney, Stuart McCloskey, Jacob
Stockdale, Rob Herring, Iain Henderson,
Nick Timoney, Jordi Murphy and Sean Reidy.
On top of that there is the very real talent
wealth in the firm emergence of youngsters
such as Tom O’Toole, Eric Sullivan,
Stewart Moore, James Hume and Robert
Baloucoune, many of whom have already
been capped by Ireland in the last year.
Indeed, over twenty of the squad are now
fully fledged internationals.
That is testament to McFarland’s investment
in domestic products, his careful coaching
nurture of players drawn from way beyond
traditional pathways, and he has been just
as earnest in his recruitment of a coaching
team which adds great value and shares
his passion for improvement, McFarland’s
measure of the drive towards trophies at
Kingspan Stadium.
Danny Wilson, the Warriors’ Head Coach,
has not always had the stable foundations
in his squads since taking the reins at
Scotstoun so the familiar sustained league
challenges of the last few seasons has
not materialised.
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