Chiefs fight ‘unfair’ RFU proposal to limit imports
EXETER Chiefs’ women are set to go to war with the RFU over proposals to severely limit the number of overseas players they can field in the Premier 15s.
As a start-up franchise attempting to pull a squad together last year amid the brutal backdrop of the Covid-19 pandemic, Chiefs head coach Susie Appleby trawled the world and currently has four Americans, four Canadians and a Japanese in her squad.
Bolstered by star performers Gabby Cantorna, McKinley Hunt, Kate Zackery and Taylor Black, Exeter have made a flying start to emerge as title contenders, having recently defeated the league’s traditional giants Harlequins and Saracens at Sandy Park.
A crowd of almost 1,500 turned out to see their pre-Christmas thrashing of Sale and Chiefs officials believe the women’s game is ready to take off in Devon. However, they now face being cut off at their knees by plans to restrict non-European player numbers.
Ahead of a summit meeting with the RFU this Wednesday, Appleby told The Rugby Paper: “They’re trying to limit us to two overseas players, which is just ridiculous because we were a start-up team last summer, so do the league want a spectacle or not?
“It’s not like the men’s game, we were doing it from a standing start during a pandemic and we’re an ambitious club that wants to be competitive, not also-rans, so initially we had to recruit from abroad and we’ve invested money into growing the game.
“Equally, girls we’ve recruited have invested their careers and they love it here, but now the RFU want to tie our hands behind our backs. It’s unfair on the girls and it’s unfair on the club because we came in on the basis of having three years to find our feet.
“We’re barely halfway through year one but now they want to move the goalposts and it’s just ridiculous because we need visas in place, which is not an overnight business, and when you’re recruiting, people’s lives and careers are at stake.”
Part of the RFU’s reasoning behind the move is to encourage the development of England-qualified players, but Appleby counters: “It’s not as if we don’t want to develop English players, of course we do, but at this stage we just need additional quality.
“We’ve got very good English players in our squad and younger ones coming through, but we need some experienced players, especially in the forwards.
“We want to attract big crowds and we’ve already proved that we can get good numbers here, so if the women’s game wants to be more professional and grow, why are we being held back? That’s not something the game should consciously be doing.
“If they’d said to us that by year two we had to reduce our overseas contingent to six and by year three it had to be two or three, then fair enough, you can plan for that. But to just try and chop us off now is unfair and we’ll be fighting this all the way.”