Old Belvedere RFC

The only Limerick side competing in the top tier.

They open their campaign at home to Old Belvedere tomorrow afternoon.

And Young Munster head coach Ger Slattery joins us on the line to look ahead to the new campaign.

Ger, all the pre-season preparations ready to be put into practice at Tom Clifford Park tomorrow?

Straight into it.

Old Wesley, core constitution, straight in, no kissing, Terran York College, Lansdowne, St. Mary's College, Young Munster and Old Belvedere.

Berkey, in all seriousness, you've been around the game a long, long time.

We've seen St. Mary's win a historic final.

And it'd be nice to see Cookies have a good crack off top four.

Indeed, it will.

And last but not least, Old Belvedere, under the stewardship of Quentin O'Neill, have unbelievably good form in Olly Campbell Park.

Last season we saw green shoots away from home, but a lot of people have tipped them to go one better and break into the top half of the table, if not the top four.

We all know what he can do, what he's done for us.

You've got Thomas Connolly coming in from Old Belvedere.

You've got Billy Bowen and Fianna Fáil, both coming up from the academy.

We've heard lots about Billy Bowen.

She also scored a try in front of a record attendance for a standalone Irish women's fixture at the Aviva Stadium against Scotland in the final round and also clocked up five tries in one game for Leinster in their Inter Pro Series win over Ulster a couple of weeks ago.

So a great year for her and I caught up with the Wexford now Old Belvedere player.

How does it feel now being a fully fledged senior captain international?

Yeah, no, it's definitely been a big step up.

I think it's like 14 or 15 touches they want per game.

So it's something we're really getting after, you know, just like flip-flopping between both wings and trying to jump in each spaces that you can see on the way around.

That's Old Belvedere and Ireland winger Robin O'Connor.

Finally today, I caught up with Beth Buttermer.

And most of the AIL te- teams in Leinster are based out of Dublin.

So, like, even, uh, this year, like, you have one of the academy players coming up from Leinster, but he's from Carlow, right? But now he's playing for Out Bel- Old Belvedere.

Yeah.

Right? So on the, on the program, like, when you go to the matches, what you see next to his name is Old Belvedere, not Carlow, where that's where he grew up and played his rugby.

And, and that kind of thing annoys me because I'm like, but that's ...

He's n- he has no connection to that club really.

I forgot to mention, there was a lot of rugby clubs here, night clubs as well.

There was Belvedere, there was Old Belvedere, there was Lansdowne.

Based around Donnybrook, that area.

And we used to go there as well for, you know, they had full bar licences and they could stay up to budget.

Yeah.

Um, uh, so when it comes to, when it comes to answering that question of, like, what, what differentiates us from Old Belvedere or St. Mary's or whatever o- other local rugby, uh, club, um, even the likes of, um, uh, there's a, um, expat, expat team that play.

Um, and for me, looking at the Warriors, um, w- I feel like we've saved people, and people come to us, um, uh, whether they've come to Dublin for the very first time and they just want to find a community, that they're, they don't know anyone at all, and they just want friends.

They just want people that they can share an activity with.