It's a tad ironic that Connacht Rugby, an organisation founded 140 years ago, should bring its flagship team to Mayo for the first time for a competitive fixture just a year after signing a deal with an American healthcare company that stipulates all games until 2036 will be played at The Sportsground in Galway city.

Obviously some dispensation has been forthcoming from Dexcom, a company about to open a plant in Athenry with 1,000 jobs and which is renowned for manufacturing glucose monitor devices which help manage diabetes, to allow this United Rugby Championship fixture with Munster to be played in Castlebar.

ALL YOU NEED TO KNOW: Connacht play Munster in MacHale Park

The Sportsground, which opened in 1927, was renamed Dexcom Park a year ago as part of a deal with the multinational which has its headquarters in San Diego.

The venue has been a building site all season but Connacht have continued to play there with reduced capacity on three sides of the ground. When work on the €40m redevelopment is completed next season — a new stand and a state of the art training centre are the focal points — capacity will be 12,000.

That’s more than enough for the current needs of Connacht Rugby as The Sportsground rarely sold out even after they won the league nine years ago.

The Connacht chief executive Willie Ruane, the Ballina native who took charge over a decade ago after a playing career that straddled the conversion period from amateur to professional, said when the deal was signed a year ago that there was some provision if they reached the knockout stages of competitions where minimum home capacity rules kicked in to bring a game elsewhere, but that all matches would take place at the renamed Dexcom Stadium for 12 years.

SOLD OUT

That's what makes this match at Hastings Insurance MacHale Park all the more unique then. It’s unlikely to ever be repeated.

READ: 'We had to move the cattle off the field' - Former Mayo rugby player remembers

It’s a once-off although maybe if they were to reach a European knockout game that demanded a ground with more than 12,000, then maybe Castlebar would top the list of alternatives?

The fact that more than double the attendance of the new €40m stadium development in Galway sold out for Castlebar in jig time should not be surprising.

It’s a novel, one-off event. The timing and the opposition was well chosen by Connacht. Munster will bring a big crowd, the internationals will be back and Connacht Rugby, to their credit, kept ticket prices reasonable.

John Prenty, the Connacht GAA boss, revealed back in January that they were fielding calls looking for tickets after the game sold out. Has a GAA venue in the province ever sold out three months in advance?

The rapidity in which the match sold out begs the question, of course, why on earth didn’t Connacht Rugby do this earlier and play a match in MacHale Park or some other GAA ground? But let’s not forget that until recently GAA rules prevented this and that it would have required all sorts of diplomacy to get this across the line.

It promises to be a wonderful occasion. It’s a competitive fixture and while both Connacht and Munster come into it on the back of defeats, there is much to play for.

Connacht may not qualify for the knockout stages, their form has been indifferent all season. Supporters have been tearing their hair out at the inconsistency of their displays but there is no denying their games have been wildly entertaining with massive leads fluctuating throughout the contests.

It will be strange for the likes of Bundee Aki, Mack Hansen and Finlay Bealham to run out onto MacHale Park, even more strange for regular fans to see them there.

But the sight of Connacht jerseys standing in the middle of Mayo GAA’s heartland will be a moment in time for all the rugby people in that county who have laboured down through the decades to keep the game alive and make it grow. 

Dave Heffernan, the Connacht hooker from Ballina who has worn the green of Ireland, encapsulated it all some time ago. His dad Ivan was the Mayo goalkeeper for several years and when Heffernan was growing up his main desire to play in MacHale Park was in the green and red.

He won a county U-16 title with Ballina Stephenites there but this Saturday will be special, not just for him and his family, but the wider Ballina community.

CALLEARY AND O’DONNELL

From the moment this novel fixture was announced I couldn’t help but think of what the reaction would be of two great Mayo stalwarts who are no longer with us but who soldiered for decades to nurture the game.

Seán Calleary, the former TD whose son Dara has followed him with equal success in politics, was a wise old counsel to turn to when the IRFU tried to get rid of the Connacht team in a cost-cutting exercise in 2003.

I was the Connacht team manager back then in a break for a few years from journalism. I’m not sure people now can really appreciate how the professional team came within a breath of being extinguished back then.

The work of many people saved it. There were firebrands at the front of the march — badly needed as teeth had to be shown — but there were others who quietly but very effectively worked the diplomatic route and were just as impactful.

Seán Calleary worked those back channels and none of us would be in MacHale Park this Saturday looking at a rugby match without the likes of him.

Same, too, for another former Connacht Branch President Gerry O’Donnell. The Ballinrobe native and proud Ballina clubman furthered the rugby cause on and off the field for decades and would be beautifully insufferable this week with the excitement of this occasion.

He went everywhere looking at Connacht but never lived to see the day Connacht finally came to his homestead. He was the president a decade ago when we went on that unforgettable trip to Siberia for a European Challenge Cup game and we got stranded there when the plane’s engine froze on the ground in the minus 20 degrees Celsius temperatures.

I was out for a coffee with him one day during that trip to Krasnoyarsk, a city in the notorious gulag area of Siberia, a journey 2,600 miles east of Moscow near Mongolia. I noticed his attention was drawn to a butcher’s across the road where they hung the meat outside in the freezing conditions and brought it into the shop to thaw for cutting and sale.

O’Donnell, a meat wholesaler known the length and breadth of Mayo and beyond, remarked: ‘I can’t help but figure out how much money I’d save in refrigeration if we had this situation back home!’
Staging this match in Castlebar is as much a nod to people like Calleary and O’Donnell as it is to the hundreds of young people who might now take an interest in rugby in Mayo, or nurture the desire in those already on board.

But isn’t it a further irony that the week when Connacht Rugby finally make the short trip up from Galway they find themselves upstaged by a Mayo football team who somehow came through the madness of the final day of the Allianz League to book a final showdown with Kerry.

The cuckoos are in the nest in Castlebar just as the green and red take flight to Croke Park.