Lancashire clubs highlight need for level playing field
“The new Lancashire league is trying to recapture the spirit of community rugby in these professional days”
Iwas not surprised by the news in last Sunday’s Rugby Paper that a number of Lancashire clubs were forming a breakaway competition from the RFU’s league structure, as I was told this was about to happen by the president of Widnes rugby club.
Last week’s article explained many of the reasons why the clubs have felt it necessary to find another way of providing local weekly rugby for their communities against a backdrop of trying to compete in a league structure with no measure of like for like clubs in terms of ambition and finance.
In other words, clubs with different objectives and bank balances who are prepared to pay players in a league that cannot justify any level of payment for players are competing against clubs who play just for fun.
As the game was amateur, the league structure had no rules about payments when put in place, and when the game went professional there were no safeguards there to protect clubs that were either unable or unwilling to pay players.
The RFU organised a one-year moratorium on all clubs from the beginning of professionalism to give clubs a period of time to adjust to the financial implications of offering professional contract to players.
However, a number of clubs took the moratorium as an opportunity to find backers, sign and take control of the players, and ultimately the game, before the RFU had worked out their own strategy.
Unfortunately the masters of the leagues have failed to live up to the promises made when leagues were created and the hope of incremental funding as clubs progressed up the league structure were quickly confined to history.
A number of grassroots clubs still harbour ambitions but many are trapped by those early promises, and having started to pay players back then in the hope of gaining promotion and extra funding, are now unable to stop for fear of losing players.
One club I was temporarily involved in even paid players to attend training, something that I said at the time was a waste of money as many of those paid would never have been good enough to make the first team.
When I became director of rugby I immediately stopped the payments for training and dropped any player who didn’t turn up for training unless they had a good reason. The club maintained their position in the leagues and saved a lot of money for their main sponsor/investor in the process.
A few years ago the RFU mooted the idea that the games below the national leagues should revert to amateur status with penalties for any club who breached the rules, but this was rightly rejected.
Any such action would have stopped ambitious clubs, like Eailing Trailfinders, from pursuing their dream of Premiership glory and sealed the fate of the clubs below national league level. Some would say that would be a good thing as it would leave the professional clubs in their own little bubble with enough space to move up and down without falling into the regional game, but it misses the point.
The league structure was put in place to allow teams that developed on and off the field to move from the bottom to the top of the league, improving England rugby along the way.
Over the years people seem to have forgotten how the old system stifled ambition with clubs unable to improve their fixture list no matter how much they improved as a team. Meanwhile the closed shop of the senior clubs sat at the top of the pile, not worried in the slightest about results or the quality of the players the game produced for the national team.
The leagues structure changed all that and made clubs accountable for their results, encouraging better training and coaching thereby improving the quality of players available for England selection.
Even before professionalism put the final nail in the coffin of a number of the old ‘senior’ clubs, the leagues had already managed to consign many to the lower leagues.
It is also true that leagues made a cultural shift in the way rugby clubs operated, as the first team became the all-important focus of the club.
Clubs were always about membership and all the clubs I played for in my early career had six plus teams but, as Ray French said in last week’s article, Liverpool St Helens now run three teams, which is good for nowadays.
The focus of resources on the first team has forced many clubs to choose between survival and cutting teams, whereas in the past a club was as much about its fifth team as its first.
When clubs played away with the firsts, thirds and fifths teams travelling, and the seconds, fourths and sixths staying in the club, or visa versa, their return was awaited when they either celebrated or commiserated.
Those moments created the spirit of community rugby, a spirit that the new league is trying to recapture in these professional days and I sincerely hope they succeed.