This was the season to scrap Premiership Cup
We ought to be getting the replica shirts out of the wardrobe in anticipation of the start of the new Premiership season, but of course in this crazy RWC year, we’re still seven weeks away from the start of the serious club rugby.
Because of this we’ll be playing right through until the third week of June.
In four weeks’ time we see the start of the generally unloved Premiership Rugby Cup, and this year it messes things up pretty comprehensively.
Listening to some directors of rugby, while they’re too polite to lambast it, they were pretty clear it isn’t their preferred way to kickoff the season.
Nearly every club starts a campaign with pre-season friendlies, and these are the chance to give around 30 players some game time.
However, the Premiership Rugby Cup will see teams of fifteen, with eight replacements, so only 23 players will have the chance of some game time in any given match.
This is unsatisfactory, and the competition, which already struggles to find its identity, will be even more of a muddle.
In case you’ve forgotten, the labyrinthine structure of the competition sees the 12 clubs put into three groups of four, and they
play their three rivals in their Pool either home or away, and then they have a ‘derby’ game against a team from a different Pool. Of course they do, how else would you organise a Cup competition!
Premiership Rugby proclaimed the ‘rampant success’ of last year’s competition! The two semi-finals each attracted crowds of fewer than 6,000, which hardly screams huge interest from fans.
Of course some fans will turn out for the Pool games because they’ve been starved of action over the summer, and besides, we’re supporters and will watch anything if ‘our’ club is involved, but this is hardly the stuff of dreams.
The added madness is that the first games clash with the start of the RWC.
This competition has always been unloved, and the Anglo-Welsh Cup iteration of it died because the Welsh regions lost interest. This RWC year was the perfect opportunity to put it out to grass, and leave the clubs to organise their preseason games, structured to suit their purposes.
There won’t be anyone who wasn’t moved by Kearnan Myall’s interview with Robert Kitson in
The Guardian about the stresses that professional rugby had on his mental health, but we need to be careful to ensure that the reaction is proportionate.
The plain fact is that mental health issues affect people in all walks of life, and rugby isn’t alone in being backward at recognising and treating them. The danger is that some might draw the conclusion that professional rugby imposes unique pressures on players.
Other elite athletes have experienced similar problems, with cricketers, golfers and footballers all having gone public.
However, life itself imposes pressures on people, and someone who loses their job and is struggling to provide for their family, or someone who struggles with the breakdown of a relationship or the death of a loved one, is just as likely to become depressed and consider suicide. I have lost two friends to suicide, neither of whom were elite sportspeople, and both managed to conceal their issues until it was too late.
This in no way diminishes Myall’s story, and the hope has to be that the game will recognise the importance of the issue, and put structures in place to offer support.
Something that did surprise me was Wasps’ statement which said they were ‘shocked and saddened to learn of former lock Kearnan Myall’s recent revelations about his struggles with mental health during his time in rugby’, which implies it came as news to them. It’s clear from the interview that other Wasps players were aware there was a problem – one of them apparently dragged Myall back over a fifteenth floor balcony – but it seems it didn’t get back to the club.
If that’s the case, then this isn’t just about supporting players once they have a problem, but creating an environment where players feel they can be open about what’s happening, without fear that their careers will be adversely affected.
We hear a lot about player welfare, but most of it is about physical issues. Let’s hope that Myall’s frankness enables the game to move beyond simply treating ‘knocks’, into wider health issues.