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Do you remember the Mini Clubman? My dad owned one when I was a nipper. It was a hybrid car, with the face of a mini and the backside of a garden shed. Indeed if you owned one of the deluxe type with timber trims, then analogies with garden sheds with an engine were very apt. The Mini Clubman was a solid, reliable, unspectacular old school British made car of the 60’s with nay a foreign part in its body.
It died a death with the decline of the British car making industry leaving just faint memories for passengers or drivers, barely scratching any positive thoughts for a mundane piece of British engineering. A thoroughbred it wasn’t and its demise was every bit as ordinary as its arrival. That is how I remember it anyway. Morris Minor’s have a cosier if only slightly less jaundiced niche in the distant recesses of my childhood.
Strange then that when my thoughts turned to that other club man, the one with the small ‘c’ who inhabits the distant recesses of rugby clubs up and down the length and breadth of Ulster, that my mind dragged up memories of the Mini Clubman. For there appeared to be a parallel between mini club man’s attitude to the professional game and the Mini Clubman’s niche in the car market.
Typically mini club man is a club stalwart, retired after the decline of his physical star and whose memories and fondness for the amateur game linger like an old book of photographs on a dusty shelf. He might make the club presidency one of these days as reward for all those years effort at the coalface of the club’s game. Like the Clubman car, he’s the steady face of the unspectacular in an ever evolving landscape of modernity and progress. He resists the advances of foreign influences. They prevent the locals from having a place on the professional team.
Mini clubmans niche is in the clubhouse after the game every Saturday his team’s playing at home. Here he revels in the cabal like atmosphere of conspiracy, racy titbits, the snide aside about this pro or that academy player. Nothing will ever match the brilliance of his play on any given Saturday. He might have played for Ireland or even the Lions but the bad knee prevented him ever deluding the selectors. It fuels all the bad vibes he’s assembled in his brain and fits all the stereotypes he’s stored up over the last ten years about pro rugby and UR.
The mini clubman is solid reliable vehicle that rarely turns left out of the club car park and up the road to Ravenhill. The last time he was there Ulster were beat. Andy Ward had a stinker, Alan Solomons was a cross dresser and the Scoop had all the wrong types in it, taking photographs and hangin’ out round the pros. The mini clubman is a breed apart.
A backwoodsman who sees change as diminution of everything that has preceded and must be resisted for the sake of it.
Club rugby of course needs mini clubman. Without them it would have died long ago like the British car industry. Like the British union bosses who saw the arrival of the Japanese car industry as an instrument power dissolution, so mini clubman tilts at the windmills of pro rugby. It’s a two way partnership, pro rugby can bring benefits to club rugby and club rugby can have input into the pro game.
It isn’t happening of course and the ‘them and us’ attitude prevails like a damp blanket in an unaired room.
Ideally the AIL club game should be the avenue down which the Mini Coopers of the amateur game should travel at regular intervals and into the pro game car park. It hasn’t happened, mostly because the strength of the amateur game is too inadequate to allow a cross fertilisation of players
There is too, the fast tracking of youngsters through schools and academy rugby which bypasses the amateur game, partly for the reason I have given above……
Ultimately in a country of population 1.7million, roughly the size of a largish British city, there are too many rugby clubs vying for too little talent. The amalgamation of clubs could be the answer with the possibility of county teams. Could mini clubman countenance or absorb the loss of power in the interests of creating a thoroughbred hybrid that would be competitive in the modern game that’s rugby union? Could we see Bangor, Dee and Ards combine as North Down, to rationalise and concentrate resources. Or Banbridge, Dromore, Portadown and Lurgan make up a combined team mid Ulster team that would surely be competitive in the upper echelons of the AIL? It won’t happen while mini clubman holds the keys to the door of the clubhouse.
Corrections, comments or questions?