CUE
MUSIC:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rY0WxgSXdEE
FREDDIE and the boys really now are the sound track to the Gallagher Premiership, with the demise of London Irish. It's been a long time coming, some exiled Scots down there in the Sudentenland are still sore about how, back in the dying days of the last century, Irish survived at English Rugby's top table, while London Scottish and Richmond were cast out – We Jocks do love a bit of schadenfreude.
Of course, the fall of the Paddies, coming as it does so quickly on the tail of the demise of Wasps and Worcester will make little difference to the landscape of the game in the South. God is an Englishman and the big English clubs will, whilst moaning about how the Rugby Football Union interferes in the game they think they own, continue their great game of seeing which billionaire has the deepest pockets and can piss his fortune further up the wall for the longest time.
They may not have the state-backed oil wells depth of pockets of the foreign owners of the big English football clubs, but, these mainly Tory owners of the English rugby clubs will carry-on, over-paying non-English talent, looking down at the second class citizens of the BKT United Rugby Championship and The Pro 14, safe in the knowledge that BT Sport, or whatever they now call themselves, and the likes of Robert Kitson and Stephen Jones will continue to tell the guillible rugby public - “English Rugby is still the best old boy.”
“Aye Right!” and its equivalent in French and Irish tells a different story.
Meanwhile, across in Luxembourg, in their offices on avenue Monterey and Boulevard Prince Henri, one supposes the chaps at CVC Capital Partners are crunching the numbers and asking the difficult questions.
Common sense perhaps dictates, a re-arrangement of the deck chairs is called for in European Club Rugby, as the RMS English Rugby ploughs on through the iceberg field. It's perhaps time for the 57 Old Farts to rouse themselves and sort out the good name of their game – leaving it to the city spivs clearly hasn't worked.
Rugby Union went OPEN back in 1995. OK, they allowed players to be paid, maybe only now are we starting to realise, leaving it up to the market to regulate payments perhaps wasn't in the best interests of the game.
Back when I played in the Amateur Era (and my last game was 38 years ago), at grass-roots club level, players still generally had to provide their own kit; you paid the beer levy post-match, so you could give your opponents a drink. However, even then, in the upper levels of the game, players were being provided with, at the very least, jerseys, shorts and stockings. We didn't allow lifting in the lines out back then, so the kilometres of elastic strapping we go through today wasn't as issue. If, like me, you wanted to tape your ears, you paid for your own. Doing that today would bankrupt some lock forwards over a season.
Post 1995 – the game of Rugby Union Football has been a textbook example of Parkinson's Law. The genie is well and truly out of the bottle, and there is no way of putting it back.
However, if World Rugby and the individual unions were to be rounded-up and marooned on a desert island until they came up with workable proposals, they could yet save the game.
They have to accept:
Only international rugby makes money
We protect it and make it as attractive as we can
A certain percentage of what each governing union makes from international rugby MUST be allocated to keeping the grass-roots game under that union's jurisdiction healthy
Professional club rugby is a means of getting the elite players ready for the international game
As such, each league and the various inter-league club championships have to be governed by CBAs (Collective Bargaining Agreements) to ensure as level a playing field financially as it's possible to provide
Each country can only sustain a given number of fully-professional clubs and strict boundaries around their financing and operation have to be agreed and maintained
In each country – the governing Union has to be in-charge
Maybe, if we had a better-regulated market, we would have a sustainable one, and the game could flourish. If we don't, and this, in particular refers to England – then Rugby Union is doomed.
Going down the current route is to remain on the Highway to Hell, and the next question is: which will be the next big club to fold?
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