Keen to strike while the iron is hot, Connacht have set a timeframe of the end of the summer to decide upon the site for a proposed new 10,000 home ground. The province's chief executive Willie Ruane maintained that remaining in their spiritual home of the Sportsground was their preferred option but that other avenues were also being explored.
Speaking at the launch of their ‘Vision and Strategy’ document at the Aviva Stadium, Ruane said: “The stadium is something we have as one of our utmost priorities. We’re clear that we will pretty quickly reach a ceiling in terms of where we’re currently at. And whether that will be a ceiling in terms of capacity or whether that’s a ceiling in terms of the experience we can offer the people who do come there, and that they want to come again.
“We’ve done a lot of work in the last 12 months in terms of what we believe a stadium should look like and what kind of size it should be, and we’re working effectively on two different options. One of them is that we stay and we’re currently in discussion with the IGB (Irish Greyhound Board, who are senior tenants at the trust-owned ground) with regards to that, because it has to be a shared vision for the Sportsground, and there are very simple practical matters that apply in that regard.
“The other one is, if that isn’t do-able, what would an alternative look like. We would have some opportunities that we believe have some strong potential in that regard as well. So there’s a lot of stuff going on in the background that could happen very quickly, please God, or it could get stuck a small bit. But the one thing I can assure is that there is a considerable amount of work going on in the background.
“We don’t want to have fans outside the ground who can’t get in, and then for the ones that do get in, we want to make sure that the experience is something that they deserve and that our own players and everyone else involved in Connacht rugby deserve.
“Around 10,000 would be a decent starting point,” admitted Ruane, “and something that if, on a given day, we needed more, would have the potential to do that. The last thing we want to do is build something that’s too big and end up with something that we outgrow very quickly.
“Sometimes it’s easy to look down the road and say we’ll never get to that point, but you’ll never get there if you don’t think you’ll get there either. It’s not that we’re looking to build some sort of coliseum, that would lack the atmosphere that we all want, and that we think we have in the Sportsground, to replicate that atmosphere. But it’s taking a lot of our time.”
Ruane confirmed that re-developing the Sportsground would be their preferred option. “The Sportsground is our home, but it has to work for both parties, us and the IGB. That would be our preference but it’s our duty to look at all other options, and we’re doing that very seriously because that’s what we should be doing.
Connacht are, he also admitted, “pretty maxed out” in terms of the current expanded capacity of nearly 8,000, but that said they opted against moving Saturday’s Guinness Pro12 semi-final against the Glasgow Warriors to a bigger venue.
“We know that we could have moved the match this weekend, but it would have been the wrong thing to do. Our supporters have waited a long time to have a semi-final in the Pro 12 held in their own home ground and moving that to anywhere else simply on the basis of commercial considerations at this stage would have been the wrong thing to do.”
Even Connacht players have been restricted to their minimum allocation of two free tickets plus the option to buy two more, and with demand comfortably exceeding supply this weekend, Ruane estimated that, given the possibility to do so, “we would definitely have been over 10,000. How far beyond that? Is it 12,000 or 15,000? I’m not sure, but I think if we had the space an awful lot of people around the province and beyond want to be there this week, and who wanted to be there for the matches prior to this. We had a considerable level of excess demand for the Leinster, Munster and last Glasgow match as well. That’s great, but that also means there are people outside the ground as well, which you don’t want.”
As evidenced by its subtitle, Grassroots to Green Shirts, Connacht’s strategic plan for the next four years focused on the province’s community base and a greater alignment between the schools, clubs, academy and professional team, while also improving their finance, governance, communications, operations and commercial activities.
Achieving qualification annually for the Champions Cup is one of their performance goals, incorporating at least one quarter-final between now and 2020, as well as having an average of four players in Irish matchday squads by then and a heightened quotient of indigenous Connacht players within their own squad.
Record-breaking former outhalf and head coach Eric Elwood, now the province's domestic rugby manager enthusiastically welcomed yesterday's document.
“I’m in Connacht quite a long time so I can say honestly and openly that we’ve never had a document like this, and that’s not being disrespectful to anyone I’ve worked with in the past. To realise where you want to get to, you need a road map and to have a road map with this detail that affects everybody in the province, in the clubs and the schools, they now know exactly where we want to get to.
“I think when we produce this to the people in the clubs they’ll now really buy into it and that will hopefully make my job easier in that they’ll now see where we want to get to. And it’s the whole joined up thinking, aligned, where we now do this together, and we need the support of the clubs and the schools to make this happen.”
