Keep your conferences Geech, they don’t work
With time on their hands, every man and his dog seem to have been setting out their ideas on the future of the game. Recently Sir Ian McGeechan, writing in the
Telegraph, set out his tenpoint vision.
Inevitably it started with the worthy aim of putting the players first, but then it focused primarily on the Test arena: offer Tier 2 nations better support and get them playing more often against the bigger nations, and even when it touched on the club game there was a sting in the tale!
He suggests standardising all the leagues at 14 teams, something that looks sensible, until he set out his vision of two seven-team conferences in each.
We hear this sort of nonsense far too often, and some leagues, the PRO14 and Super Rugby, have even tried it, but it has hardly been a roaring success. It isn’t rocket science to describe how a proper league works: every team plays every other, home and away, exactly as happens in the Premiership and the Top 14. Once you start tinkering with that then the integrity of the league disappears.
In the PRO14 every club play the others in their conference home and away – so far so good – but they then play each of the teams in the other conference, home OR away! Home advantage counts for a lot in rugby, and as soon as you deny every team the same number of home games then the league is compromised. Super Rugby’s fatally flawed format is so convoluted as to be not even worth describing! These crazy ideas stem from people whose mindset is that what really matters in rugby is creating space for even more internationals.
Sir Ian strongly advocates a global nine-month season, with ‘clearly delineated club…and international windows’. Again, it sounds good in theory, but then there’s the rub: under his plan he says that ‘something has to give’ and surprise, surprise, it’s the clubs that have to change in order to accommodate Test matches!
His answer is that the Champions Cup gets ‘streamlined’ – in other words, you take one of the jewels in northern rugby’s crown, and you tinker around with it.
His language is revealing, as when talking about opening the autumn window for Tier 1 and Tier 2 internationals, he writes that could happen because there would be ‘no club games getting in the way’! Getting in the way? Sir Ian, your slip is showing!
Lists like that are totally disheartening because they to recognise the realities of the new world order, where the club game is no longer the servant and Test matches the master.
Lists like that are totally disheartening because they fail to recognise the realities of the new world order, where the club game is no longer the servant and Test matches the master. What we need is a calendar that recognises two equal partners: a thriving club game that involves diehard fans week in and week out, and the two Test windows in the spring and the autumn. In England that almost exists, and the ‘rent’ paid by the RFU for access to the elite players is at the heart of it.
If ‘Player Welfare’ is the first of rugby’s current mantras, then the second is ‘Global Calendar’, something that has so far proven to be unachievable, and I now wonder whether, in the current circumstances, is even desirable?
Every league and union across the globe is in deep trouble, and it’s likely that some of them may not come through this crisis intact.
World Rugby are about to elect a new chairman, but his four-year tenure will be dominated by one thing: the survival of as many bits of the game as possible. When things are as bad as they currently are, it’s inevitable that the clubs, the leagues, and the unions will be focusing inwards on what they need to do to ensure that they can carry on.
The drive for a global calendar comes from two quarters: from the south where they have systematically messed things up over recent years – wrecking Super Rugby, treating the Islanders appallingly, imposing unpopular franchises, and so on – and from World Rugby desperately trying to hold on to their power.
In the northern hemisphere things may be far from perfect, but it all works. The leagues co-exist pretty happily with the curfail rent international schedule, the Premiership and the Top14 are doing well, the Six Nations is popular, and the Champions Cup is simply brilliant.
An English club fan might carp about losing their players for Test matches, but in return they know that their club is being properly compensated for its loss. What would be utterly disastrous would be to wreck the game in the north to try to bail out the south, or cede further control to an increasingly remote ruling body that is really only interested in Test match rugby.
Let’s put the global calendar idea on the back burner and in the north focus on the leagues, the European cups, the Six Nations, and on generating as much revenue as possible when rugby restarts. As for the southern hemisphere nations, they need to tackle their own internal issues in a grown-up way before expanding their horizons.