THE INAUGURAL season of the British and Irish Cup reaches the knockout stages on the weekend of April 23rd to 25th with an Anglo-Irish final guaranteed by Munster drawing Ulster in the semi-final in yesterday’s draw in Cardiff yesterday.
Munster have home advantage but the winners of the Cornish Pirates and Doncaster Knights will host the final on Sunday, May 16th, a fixture that will be televised live on Sky Sports.
Both of the knockout rounds are clashing directly with Magners League (the last round of the regular season and semi-final weekend) so there will be no frontline squad members available.
However, the All-Ireland League clubs were guaranteed no fixture overlap. These play-off dates have yet to be confirmed.
Meanwhile, Michael Bradley will announce a Connacht squad today for Saturday’s Magners League meeting with Leinster at the RDS. Flanker Ray Ofisa and centre Niva Ta’auso are both ruled out with knee injuries but captain John Muldoon is expected to pack down at blindside wing forward despite suffering from a groin problem.
Twenty two points separate bottom-side Connacht from top-of-the-table Leinster but with six games remaining in Bradley’s last campaign as head coach, the Cork man remains upbeat that the nine-point gap to Ulster can be bridged despite Connacht failing to get off the bottom rung of the ladder in the past two seasons.
To finish ahead of Ulster would guarantee entry to next season’s Heineken Cup. The other route into the top tier of Europe is to win the Amlin Challenge Cup with Connacht hosting Bourgoin in the quarter-final on April 4th.
“The best team doesn’t always win a rugby match,” said Bradley ahead of Saturday’s trip to Dublin. “Your classic example of that is Ireland and Scotland. Scotland played to their gameplan and won that match. That’s what we’ll be doing.”
And those tactics, according to Bradley, will be to avoid running at the European champions.
“We’d love to win the game but we’d need to be very efficient and effective on how we do our work on the night. In the past, sides have possibly run the ball too much against them. We might look to change that. Put the ball in behind them and see what happens.”
Seán Cronin is the only returning player from Ireland’s Six Nations squad but as a largely unused replacement, the young hooker is available for selection. Other Connacht squad members, Tiernan O’Halloran and Eoin Griffin, were part of the Irish under-20s team that won the Six Nations title with a 44-15 defeat of Scotland in Athlone last Friday night.
