GB & Ireland beat Europe to win Vagliano Trophy
Great Britain and Ireland defeated the Continent of Europe to seal a first Vagliano Trophy victory since 2005.Following the Curtis Cup win over the United States last September, the GB&I women again held their nerve in the biennial match, winning 12½-11½ at the Royal Hague Golf & Country Club in the Netherlands.Led by non-playing captain Maria Dunne, GB&I found themselves trailing by one heading into the singles with Europe claiming two early wins.However, the GB&I team fought back with the English trio of Patience Rhodes, Nellie Ong and Isla McDonald-O'Brien all scoring wins before Ireland's Aine Donegan and another England player, Sophia Fullbrook, took GB&I over the winning line in a remarkable finish to claim a first win in 20 years."It's been an unbelievable day," said Dunne."I said to the team early this morning that I had a really good feeling about today. They did the job in the foursomes, momentum went our way and they just fought. I told them last night 'just keep fighting, keep fighting for every single point or half point' and that's exactly what they did."Rhodes, Donegan, Beth Coulter, Lottie Woad and Hannah Darling were all part of the team which won the Curtis Cup and all played their part once again.Woad and Coulter lost to Paula Martin Sampedro and Carolina Lopez-Chacarra Coto respectively, but things began to turn GB&I's way with Ong's 6&5 victory, and McDonald-O'Brien edged out Camille Min-Gaultier 2&1 to pull the visitors closer, before Rhodes delivered another crucial point with a two-hole triumph over France's Sara Brentcheneff.
In a tense finish, Donegan hit a winning eagle against Cayetana Fernandez Garcia-Poggio before Fullbrook held her nerve for a one-hole victory against Emma Kaisa Dalgaard Bunch to seal it.Europe did have something to show for the day as they were 11½-6½ winners in the Junior Vagliano Trophy."We came so close at Royal Dornoch in 2023 [losing by three points] and we knew we hadn't won this event since 2005 so it feels amazing to do it," Dunne added."Patience had an incredible finish to win her singles match, before Aine rolled in that eagle on the 18th. I feel so privileged to be captain. For GB&I to now hold both the Curtis Cup and the Vagliano Trophy is fantastic."I think the success in winning the Curtis Cup last year helped the team this week. I reminded them in our team meetings that we had that momentum and belief."My three rookies have also been unbelievable and done the job for me every time I've asked them. For the three who weren't involved in the Curtis Cup, they could see the belief and they built on that too."
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Just how rich is Leinster Rugby — and should it win more?
When the final whistle blew in Croke Park last Saturday, crowning Leinster as the United Rugby Championship winners in front of 46,000 fans, the natural celebration was palpably tinged with relief. The team had developed a frustrating habit of falling short at critical moments, losing three European finals in a row in 2022, 2023 and last year to French opposition. There was a similar trend in the United Rugby Championship. It led Donncha O'Callaghan, the former Munster and Ireland player, to remark — perhaps mischievously — that 'Leinster are up there with the national children's hospital, in terms of return on investment'. Throughout the season, commentators in England and France liberally attributed budgets to the club that backed up his assessment. Ordinarily Irish rugby treats finances like the third secret of Fatima. Yet Shane Nolan, chief executive of Leinster Rugby, is a new broom at the club. A former Google Ireland executive, he is somewhat exasperated by the misinformation circulating around the club's finances. According to Nolan, Leinster's revenue falls into three buckets, very broadly speaking: ticket sales, commercial revenue and the Irish Rugby Football Union (IRFU). 'Typically we'd be running on about €8 million or €9 million of ticketing revenue, but that'll be above €10 million this year,' he said, which was a consequence of being able to sell more tickets at the Aviva Stadium than the RDS Arena. In previous seasons the club attracted 15,000 for a normal league match in the RDS, but that has risen to 18,000 or so in Lansdowne Road. Season ticket sales surged from 12,000 in previous seasons to 15,000 this season, a 25 per cent increase. While they still haven't counted the revenue from the past three weeks, which included a quarter-final, semi-final and final — about 25 per cent of the gate from which goes to Leinster — it likely means the club has hit a record for ticket revenue this year. Sponsorship and commercial income — from jersey sponsorship, match-day hoardings, merchandising and other sources — grew to about €10 million this year, which brings the province's self-generated revenue for last season to about €20 million. The third source of money is where things get a little complicated. The IRFU distributes revenue from the Six Nations, television contracts and competition income from the URC and the European Rugby Champions Cup. It provides support in a complicated array of direct grants and other supports, and all get treated differently by the provinces for accounting purposes, making comparisons difficult. Broadly speaking, the value of total IRFU supports, according to sources familiar with the matter, works out at between €11 million and €12 million annually for each of the provinces. This brings Leinster's budget this year to slightly more than €30 million. Munster, for example, declared this month that its revenues were up last year from €18 million to €20 million, though it is not clear how much of that was from ticket sales and commercial revenue, and how much of the IRFU's financial supports were included in that figure. The all-in figure for Munster is likely to be higher, though still short of Leinster's. Ulster Rugby is the only club that publishes a set of financial accounts, These date back to 2023, when the province had income of £12 million and expenditure of £12.9 million, running a loss of about £900,000. That figure was made up of £4.6 million in grants, £2.7 million in sponsorship and £3 million in match-day income. There is a significant sum of IRFU support not reflected in those accounts, meaning that for comparison purposes Ulster's annual budget is likely higher than that. • Ulster have the stadium and the fanbase… where is the talent? Connacht doesn't publish financial accounts but does disclose figures at its annual meetings. According to sources familiar with those figures, the province earns somewhere between €5 million and €6 million in self-generated commercial revenues, including ticketing, sponsorship and other sources combined. Adding the rough figure of €11 million in IRFU supports gives Connacht a budget of about €16 million. Even allowing for the difficulty of comparing apples with oranges, Leinster is clearly the healthiest Irish province, yet Nolan is quick to point out that some of the chatter about it being 'the best resourced club in the world' is wildly off base, especially compared with clubs in France and Japan. A recent report by the French Professional Championship Control Commission, which oversees the finances of its clubs in the Top 14 and the Pro D2, shows that many French clubs have substantially bigger budgets than Leinster. That report put Toulouse's budget at €62.5 million, while Stade Francais had €46.1 million, Toulon €42.3 million, and La Rochelle and Bordeaux Bègles €40.8 million each. Three of the last four winners of the European Rugby Champions Cup — two of them Leinster's conquerors — have budgets at least a third bigger than Leinster's. An independent review carried out in England in September last year showed that in the 2022-23 season, the best-funded clubs were Harlequins and Saracens, which had budgets of £26.8 million and £23.2 million respectively. Northampton, which beat Leinster this season in the semi-finals of the European Rugby Champions Cup, had a budget of £21.9 million. But a budget is only half the story — what really matters is how the clubs spend their money, and that has been a big part of the debate around Leinster's last four years. A great deal of the club's budget is spent on the ordinary costs of running a professional rugby team, and several million more is spent on grassroots rugby throughout the province. Yet in truth, only one number matters at Leinster: what is spent on players. The root of the perception is that Leinster has an unfair and disproportionate advantage over not just its Irish peers but also its French and English rivals. That stems from the IRFU central contracting structure, which takes a large chunk of the cost of star players off a province's balance sheet and into the national team budget. Were the number of central contracts equally distributed, that perhaps would not be an issue, but Leinster has 11 central contracts while the other provinces only have three between them. Ulster has none. For 11 of its first-team players, Leinster must pay only 30 per cent of their wages — though this will rise to 40 per cent next year. It allows Leinster, the critics say, to go out and boost its squad with superstars of the game, including New Zealand's Jordie Barrett, South Africa's RG Snyman and the French prop Rabah Slimani. This year it will welcome another galactico, Rieko Ioane. Leinster fans argue that the club has less control over centrally contracted players, causing huge disruptions around Six Nations time. This summer, the club will have about two dozen players away on international duty with Ireland and the Lions. Fans of provincial rivals argue that this is a high-class problem, especially with the kind of money that can buy in world-class players to smooth over those bumps. So just how big a budget for player salaries does Leinster have, when you include the IRFU contribution? In May this year The Daily Telegraph newspaper claimed that 'one informed source proposed a figure as high as €17 million'. Nolan refused to be drawn on the precise value of the playing budget for Leinster, yet based on conversations with several people familiar with the matter, the club's total salary bill is somewhere north of €12 million. That is considerably higher than for Leinster's provincial peers. Ulster's playing bill is said to be about £6.5 million, which has been significantly trimmed down from £7.5 million in previous seasons. Munster has also been trimming its wages, and according to informed sources its total bill today is only slightly higher than Ulster's. Some figures for Connacht have put its playing bill at between €5 million and €6 million. Meanwhile, English clubs have to operate within a salary cap of £6.4 million, though they are allowed some freedom to spend on marquee players, up to £7.8 million. That independent review of English clubs showed that the entire wage bill for England's top three clubs was quite high — Harlequins (£15.1 million), Saracens (£14.9 million) and Bath (£14.8 million), but that included every member of staff at the club. A report by the Professional Championship Control Commission this year put the player bill for Toulouse at €13.4 million, La Rochelle had €12.3 million, Racing 92 €12.1 million and Bordeaux Bègles €11 million. Leinster clearly sits at the top table, far above its provincial rivals, and at least on a par with the teams in France that it regards as its true rivals. Moreover, its financial wherewithal is expected to grow in the coming years, as the capacity of a redeveloped RDS grows to nearly 21,000. Nolan believes the number of season tickets, one of the main bedrocks of any sports team's finances, can grow. 'We still have massive upside, I think,' he said. 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Nick Timoney: I still think I can break through with Ireland
Pro rugby can be such a brutal and unforgiving job that its practitioners surely need an occasional reminder of why they fell in love with the sport in the first place. Nick Timoney may have had one of those moments last week, when Mamuka Gorgodze's name popped up in conversation. The context was Georgian rugby — naturally, given that Timoney is in Tbilisi preparing for next Saturday's Test. The 29-year-old Dubliner has played these opponents at U18 level and also in sevens, but when he thinks of Georgia, his first thought is Gorgodze, a rampaging loose forward and one of his childhood heroes. 'I have hours of Mamuka Gorgodze footage watched from when I was a kid,' Timoney says. 'I used to watch that ten-minute highlight video of his pretty much every week, loads of clips of him playing Poland and Russia and Spain. He was a tank. 'It was the same with other players in your position that you looked up to. I used to like the [Sébastien] Chabal clips on Rugby Dump. I used to love David Wallace, the Seán O'Briens of the world, [Stephen] Ferris back in the day. My favourite one was 'Try-Savers and Rib-Breakers 11'.' A classic, no doubt. Timoney now has his own highlights reel, and it features a try-scoring debut appearance for Ireland, against USA this time four years ago when, once again, the eyes of the rugby world were on the Lions. In most of the clips, however, he's charging around in an Ulster shirt. There have been just two more opportunities at Test match level — first, when he was a very late call-up to sit on the bench against Argentina in November 2021 and then 12 months later, when he scored two tries in an underwhelming victory over Fiji, following which Andy Farrell made it plain that he'd been displeased with the team's performance. Since then, nada — unless you count inclusion in most squad announcements (barring the World Cup) and a peripheral presence on tours to New Zealand and South Africa. His desire to play more for Ireland is intense, though. It's one of the reasons behind his decision to stay in Ulster for another two seasons for significantly less money than was on offer in Gloucester and from another club, in the Top 14. Once he's in the mix with Ireland, he's staying put. Timoney seemed mildly surprised when it was put to him that that players might show any complacency or fatigue approaching this end-of-season assignment, which also features a Test against Portugal in Lisbon on Saturday week. Yes, 15 front-liners are away with the Lions, but this only creates precious opportunities. 'I don't think there's any hint of really taking any complacency into this, just with the nature of the group that we have,' he says. 'Essentially everyone has a point to prove in some way. I'm sure there will be some lads disappointed not to be picked in the Lions squad. There will be some lads who are hoping to get the chance for the first time in a while, like myself, and there are some lads who are the first time in. So everyone's mad keen. 'In my head there's absolutely no hint of this being anything other than a chance to represent my country, which is a massive honour. We take this incredibly seriously. And to be fair to all the young lads in, like, they're desperate for their chance. Maybe desperate is the wrong word, but they're keen.' It might be the right word for him, though. Timoney can be forgiven for feeling a bit unlucky to be playing at the same time and in the same position as Josh van der Flier, who has maintained a machine-like efficiency and durability despite spending so much time in the collision zone. Discounting World Cup warm-ups, Ireland have played 40 Tests since Timoney's debut. Van der Flier has played 39 of those, starting all but two of those games. How does his understudy maintain the same level of ambition in those circumstances? 'Just by the value of the goal that's there,' he says. 'It can be tough. Being a realist, you come in to a lot of camps knowing you're not top of the pecking order. But if the other lads are desperate to play in a Six Nations opener against England, I'd be the exact same. And it still kills you inside a little bit every time a team is announced and you're not in it. But ultimately, if you really value playing for Ireland enough there's no choice but to put more emphasis on getting better and working harder.'The belief is still there. Like, I still come into every single camp thinking this be the one I break through and I'll be into it properly then. I still feel like I have loads of improvements to make and I still have the same appetite for it.' The younger Timoney set high expectations for himself, not unreasonably given that he captained Blackrock College to a Leinster Schools Senior Cup. That 2014 side included several players who would become successful full-timers: Caelan Doris, Hugo Keenan, Conor Oliver, Joey Carbery and Jeremy Loughman. But if you view Timoney as the kid who was ditched by the Leinster academy and didn't make much of an initial impact after his move to Ulster, then his career has been a resounding success. The way he tells it, he is almost an accidental pro. 'I didn't really feel like I was getting much purchase at Ulster,' he says. 'I'd signed a two-year academy deal and I was coming towards the end of my second yea. I hadn't gotten a game and hadn't gotten really that close. I remember playing an AIL game with Queen's [University] away to Corinthians, who were bottom of Division 2A, and we got absolutely hammered. 'This was five, six weeks from the end of the season and I hadn't heard anything about the following year. I thought it was coming to an end. But somewhat randomly I got a chance off the bench then the following week for Ulster against Cardiff and then got a few more chances and ended up managing to stick around for a few years. ' It's easy to wonder what if. What if Timoney had been born in Scotland or Wales? How many Test caps would he have then? What if he didn't play for a club that is often mired in mediocrity? But Ulster has worked pretty well for Nick Timoney. Yes, the club lost their last five games of the season and yes, he had to spend the next five weeks training in the Ravenhill gym along with the other six Ulster players selected for Tbilisi and Lisbon. But his consistency was also acknowledged at Ulster's awards night, when he won Player of the Year and Supporters' Player of the Year. Besides, he loves what he does. You'd have to, right? 'It's hard to watch a URC game with the same enthusiasm as when you were a child, because it's now work,' he says. 'You watch things with more of a serious face. But like, I'm still into it. Yeah, I still like keeping up-to-date what's going on, seeing who's doing what. And I think you sort of have to love it a little bit if you want to keep getting better. Like you've got to be properly into it. So I still am, yeah, for now.'
