Now spend the summer solving these problems
Well, that’s it for another Premiership season, so how on earth will we occupy ourselves for the next three months? Last September everyone predicted it would be a cracker, and it didn’t disappoint. It’s the unremitting intensity that makes the Premiership the outstanding competition that it is, although whether that’s good for player welfare is questionable
The cream rose to the top, as it always does, and despite European disappointments I’d still take the Premiership over the Top14, the Pro (however many we’re up to), and Super Rugby. It’s great that even the longest trip to an away game – Exeter v Newcastle – is manageable, that the structure is comprehensible, and that, almost invariably, teams have to put out their best side or risk getting turned over.
That’s not to say that everything is perfect, because it isn’t, and there are serious challenges that aren’t being addressed.
The most damaging is of course money. Too many clubs are in trouble, and administrative heads seem to be firmly stuck in the sand. It wouldn’t take too much of an imagination to foresee three or four clubs dicing with financial catastrophe over the next couple of years. The problem is that PRL is the owners’ club, and for as long as rich men’s egos and ambition prevail, they’re unlikely to vote for financial prudence.
The contradiction in all of this is that clubs actually need to be spending more money, not less. Squad sizes for next season are likely to be slightly down, and that’s the opposite of what needs to be happening – larger squads would enable players to have more rest, and more than likely we’d see the injury tally fall. The conventional wisdom is that the Lions tour took its toll, but let’s see how much better things are going into next season.
The thorny issue of the structure of the league has again been kicked into the long grass, but it can’t be ignored for much longer. A pound to a penny that London Irish come back up to the Premiership, even with all of their troubles. That currently means that a team will face the drop, and the short list is probably very short indeed. PRL need to accept that we have 13 clubs that deserve to be Premiership sides, and find a way of giving them all a fair crack at being sustainable at the top level.
We know that World Rugby are essentially a self-congratulatory Press Release generator, and when it comes to dealing with the game’s big issues are more than likely nowhere to be seen.
The game has a major refereeing problem, with the three northern leagues all applying the Laws slightly differently, and the south having their own interpretation. Football, cricket, golf, tennis, and every other sport manage to have rules that are consistently applied, so why can’t rugby do it? The answer is, of course, that it could happen if the will existed. A few heads need to be smacked together so that wherever we watch a match we can be sure it will be ref ’d in a consistent way.
Last weekend the Scarlets went to Glasgow for their Pro14 semifinal, but the most exciting action was after the match when they complained that the Scotstoun 4G pitch was ‘very bad’, ‘shocking’, and should be ‘illegal’.
The Scarlets players were complaining about carpet burns, but Glasgow’s Zander Fagerson says they train on it every day and he has ‘never had a scrape’. What on earth is going on? Are the pasty Welsh knees particularly delicate, and have all those days wearing the kilt toughened up the Scots?
There is a move towards more artificial pitches, and no-one seems to know whether they cause more or fewer injuries. There are coaches who are wary of selecting particular players on some surfaces, but there are more expensive options – like the hybrid one at Twickenham – that seem to work really well. I suspect this is classic business school stuff – being an early adopter of a technology brings financial benefits in the short term, but it’s also not without its risks.
In the medium-term grass pitches are going to disappear, but in the meantime we need a bit of leadership about which artificial surfaces are good or bad for rugby.