Surely Premiership fans can see what’s at stake with Lions?

WELL said, John Rowlands, in your letter last week, headed “Lions should play hard ball with PRL”.

If a Lions tour is the highly valued prize that participants’ reactions indicate, then surely any suggestion that Premiership players will be excluded from selection will cause ructions at their clubs.

This might just shake their managements out of their blinkered pursuit of narrow self-interest, whereby concessions are made only grudgingly and then subject to financial compensation.

As Colin Boag writes in the same edition, most rugby fans will identify more closely with their local club than with a more remote national or supranational team and those supporters of Premiership clubs will naturally tend therefore to downplay the importance of the Lions.

Hopefully, though, at least some of these supporters will be able to recognise that their clubs are already taking much more out of the English game than they are putting in, by channelling the bulk of the huge RFU subventions into players’ wages and will be able, therefore, to back a more generous attitude towards the Lions.

For the majority of us, whose clubs are putting more into the game, both financially and organisationally than they are channelling out of it, the fostering of a thriving Lions must, surely be a no-brainer. JOHN ALLANSON Bishop’s Stortford RFC