But since the advent of the professional era in rugby, club rugby is primarily the domain of youth players, sometimes a provincial player coming back from injury and those not good enough to make it at a higher level. It just doesn't happen anymore that, say when Cork Con are playing Blackrock you'll have 5-6-7+ internationals. The standard and therefore the entertainment value of club rugby has severely declined since professionalism. Plus, in the days of internationals playing for clubs, the provinces played maybe 3-4 games a year, (maybe 5 if a Southern Hemisphere team was touring) including the Probables vs. the Possibles Irish trial. Now in a regular season, Munster would play anything up to 25-30 games. In other words, the provinces have become the clubs of yesteryear, with the clubs of today acting as little more than feeders. I think O'Gara played all of 25 minutes for Cork Con last season, if indeed he did play at all. O'Driscoll doesn't line out for Blackrock and so forth. Also, there are no international competitive games for the clubs - never was back in the day either - those games are the purvue exclusively of the provinces today. (There is an arguement here to perhaps extend this model to football in Ireland as a way of increasing the quality and viability of the sport, but that's a topic for another post).
you mean like when wimbledon toyed with moving to belfast or dublin and remain in the english leagues? it makes sense in many ways, but is distasteful in so many more.
bump... http://thesefootballtimes.co/2017/05/18/dalymount-park-the-end-of-an-era/ 5/18/2017 Dalymount Park: the end of an era