Ulster Rugby vs Exeter Chiefs

We are not perfect; we have a huge distance to go to reach the soccer industry in England, for example. However, the league is doing positive things to deliver strong television revenues, and the PRO12 teams continue to collaborate and share ideas in order to innovate and move forward together. Over the next two to four years, I can only see greater momentum. Ruan Pienaar’s departure… We are very disappointed to lose Ruan and he is disappointed to be leaving. He is an excellent player, an excellent individual, and who knows, maybe one day we will see him back. We have an excellent relationship with the IRFU and I don’t think the Ruan situation in any way damages that. There will always be decisions that you aren’t happy with or don’t agree with, and this would be one of them, but we respect our governing body. In the past, their decisions to protect international rugby have been good. Inclusivity… In the last few years we have had 20,000 young people complete rugby programmes of 6 to 8 weeks and we are continuing to do that work. There is so much potential out there; there are 2.1 million people in the nine counties of Ulster and we want to bring what’s good about rugby to all of them. We want as many people as possible to benefit from the social aspect of rugby, as well as the physical and mental health benefits that it brings. We are increasingly strong in both female and disability rugby and it’s important that that continues to develop. We won

the first ever Girls U18 Inter-provincial Championship last month, which is extremely encouraging. We are hosting the final stages of the Women’s Rugby World Cup 2017 in Belfast next summer. We now have nine clubs in Ulster with disability rugby sections and we held the Wooden Spoon Disability Festival in 2014 which was the largest event of its kind to

be held in Europe and was a great success. So we are a game for everybody and we don’t want to leave anyone out.

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