England need strong Six Nations rivals to further World Cup bid
“To reach full potential as world’s best team, England need other Six Nations teams to be strong”
It’s not very often I agree with a winger and, even more unusually, he is French... but Phillipe Saint-Andre is indeed right to say French rugby needs a revolution. Saint-Andre’s view in last week’s paper that French rugby is ten years behind England is not quite true, but there can be no doubt the French National team have suffered because of the number of imported players currently playing in the Top 14 .
It is no exaggeration to say that on some weekends it would be hard to find fifteen French men playing in all of the Top 14 games – and certainly few if any playing in crucial positions like prop, fly-half or scrum-half of an age to be considered for les Bleu.
Rugby in France is far more parochial than even the most insular parts of the game in our country and that drives an incessant demand for the local team to win.
That expectation piles increasing pressure on the club owners and is the driving force behind the continual recruitment of foreign stars in the hope of buying instant success.
If you add in the money made from television by the Top 14, which is far more than any other club competition worldwide and the fact they have promotion and relegation, you can see why an instant success is so important.
Where Phillipe is correct is the point that it reduces opportunity for young French players to break into the Top 14 first teams and thereby gain vital experience.
But he is wrong to think that we have it right on this side of the channel and have academy players queuing up to take their place in our Premiership, when nothing could be further from the truth.
Our club owners are no different to the French and are just as willing to invest in big name stars from the southern hemisphere but are held back by a couple of small but significant factors.
First, our wage cap is significantly smaller than the Top 14 and has been made more so by the relative drop in the value of sterling against the Euro since Brexit, even if there are rumours of some of our clubs breaking the cap.
One thing this proves is that a strong club league doesn’t necessarily make for a strong national side and increasing the wage cap for clubs can actually have a detrimental effort on the quality of a country’s national side.
Second, the RFU pays a substantial amount of money to our clubs to have a certain number of English qualified players (EQP) in each match day squad over the season.
This means that the English clubs are also more likely to take part in the insidious recruitment of young players from the junior national sides of the Southern Hemisphere, filling academy places in the knowledge that the boys will become EQPs by the time they are old enough to make Premiership first team squads.
That has two advantages for the Premiership. Once the players are English-qualified (currently after three years) the clubs receive RFU money even if those players are not of international standard, and second, they are cheaper to recruit when young than as fully fledged international players, like those bought by the French.
The disadvantage is it weakens those countries from where the young players are seduced, holding back the development of the game in those countries while reducing the opportunities for home-grown talent there.
Saint-Andre also points out that the French clubs dropped their academies, making it harder for young players to break into Top 14 clubs whereas the English clubs retained their academies.
Here again he has missed a point – it is RFU funding that pays clubs for the academies.
Even so, the numbers of players who eventually get Premiership contracts reflect only a tiny proportion of those young players who are signed up for an academy place.
Another thing Saint-Andre ignored is the fact that although the FFR make a profit, it is nowhere near that of the RFU and unlike the RFU, they cannot afford to pay for the inclusion of French qualified players in the Top 14 clubs’ match day squads.
The French position was worsened due to the election of Bernard Laporte as president of the FFR. Laporte, very much a Top 14 club man, stopped the planned building of the FFR’s own national stadium, a move that would have given the French federation some real financial muscle.
The money generated could have enabled the FFR to fund French qualified player match day squad inclusion and the rebirth of academies, whether at Top 14 clubs or regional universities.
It may seem strange for an Englishman to lament the demise of French national rugby but what has to be remembered is for a team to grow in strength it needs strong local rivals who they play regularly.
If England are to reach their potential as the No.1 team in the world, it needs all the Six Nations teams to be of a competitive standard to drive our game forward.