If WRU want star players available they must pay
The saga of which Welsh players should be released for the Wales v Australia game is becoming boring. We used to have Gatland’s Law, but it now has as many holes in it as a piece of Emmental: there are so many exceptions, provisos and caveats that it has become meaningless.
Some Welsh players have signed lucrative contracts in England and France – they signed for the money, and to play a better standard of rugby.
The WRU didn’t like that, so they created the Senior Players’ Selection Policy, Gatland’s Law, and said only players based in Wales would be selected for the national team.
It was meant to bully players into turning down contracts from anyone other than the Welsh regions, and to scare others into going back over the bridge. Furthermore, the WRU decided to offer some central contracts, but don’t really have the funds to offer enough of them, or make them attractive enough, so players still sign with ‘foreign’ clubs.
There are international windows when clubs have to release players, and the English clubs comply with that, but Wales now fancy a money-spinner with Australia that will take place outside the international window, and they’d like to have their crowdpleasing exiles back.
Negotiations are under way, but I hope that PRL and the clubs take the hardest of hard lines. It really is dead simple: if you want to get a player released by a club to whom he is contracted, then you negotiate and pay the market price – that’s what the RFU have done with PRL, and by and large it works a treat. If a club want their player for an important match, and they aren’t obliged to release him under World Rugby rules, then tough, they can keep him.
As for the players, they knew the deal when they followed the money. With short and risky careers, it’s understandable that they want to maximise their earnings.
The WRU need to get together with PRL, take their cheque book to the meeting, and it would all get sorted – trying to get the clubs’ players back without paying the market price is a shabby business.
Did you watch the match between Bordeaux-Begles and Ulster? If you did, then you saw an utter disgrace of a pitch, apparently plagued by nematodes, the same as the problem that the SRU had with Murray field a couple of seasons ago.
Every time a scrum was formed, huge furrows of turf came up as the players struggled to get a foothold. Inevitably scrums collapsed, destroying the game as a spectacle, and surely putting players at risk.
We’ve had this before, at the Millennium (as was), and at Stade de France, and it isn’t as if these problems suddenly appear – in every instance the problems were known about in advance, but shamefully ignored.
The Bordeaux pitch has attracted negative comment throughout the Top14 season, and EPCR must have been aware of that before they sanc tioned the match.
The time has come to tell clubs, and Unions, that it is their responsibility to provide a decent playing surface, and if they can’t do it at their home ground, they need to make alternative arrangements. Equally, if refs are unhappy with the pitch they should take appropriate action, including abandoning, or making scrums uncontested.
If a player got seriously injured on such a pitch, then the prospect of litigation would loom large.
When the great Henry Longhurst first commentated on golf for US TV, they were perplexed by his silences – sometimes he liked to let the viewers simply watch the action, and he always avoided superfluous comments. Watching last weekend’s rugby feast, it occurred to me some rugby commentators could learn from him.
Must some be total motormouths? The winner last week of the daftest comment goes to Mark Robson for this gem, as Mike Brown of Quins went into contact: “He’s still trying to get 6kg that he lost due to septicaemia back onto his frame!” That’s a commentator flaunting research, rather than thinking about the action.