No place for basketball scorelines in rugby
PREMIERSHIP cheerleaders itching to break out the bunting in support of ringfencing should think again. The successful football fan rebellion against the European Super League, reclaiming their game from money-first owners prepared to trash the aspirational promotion-relegation culture of the sport, is a warning shot for the Premiership’s fat cat owners, and their RFU acolytes.
It tells them that if they push ahead with their attempts to ringfence the top English league – supposedly until 2024 – at the RFU Council meeting scheduled for June, they will be going against the wishes of the majority of the English Rugby Union public, and risk a similar humiliation.
It is unlikely that rugby fans will be as mobilised and vocal as their football counterparts, but the Premiership owners should not mistake that as acceptance of their closed-shop agenda, because there is a groundswell of rugby opinion following the football revolt that promotion-relegation must be retained.
Like their football counterparts, supporters of Rugby Union understand that promotion and relegation is part of a system based on sporting merit, and that a concept of aspiration – where a club can come through the leagues from bottom to top – is the lifeblood of team sports.
This week a number of leading coaches have made it clear that they are very uneasy with the move to end promotion-relegation, with Bristol’s Pat Lam in the vanguard. Minds like Lam’s have been focused sharply because of the way in which signs of the Premiership being devalued are already writ large.
Lam, whose Bristol side remain top of the Premiership table despite Friday night’s loss to
Exeter, has warned that the league has lost its competitive edge due to the lack of winning motivation for teams in the bottom third of the league.
As Lam put it: “Historically, the threat was relegation, but if we’ve taken that out what is the incentive… if it is not an everygame-matters
(league), it’s not sustainable.”
The Bristol director of rugby knows what he is talking about, because he has coached in closedshop franchise leagues like Super Rugby and the PRO14, both of which have bombed in terms of popular appeal because of their lack of jeopardy when teams underperform.
The results in the 12-club Premiership since the so-called moratorium on relegation was announced after the ill-conceived RFU Council vote just before Round 9 on February 13 indicate that the lack of incentive is taking a toll already.
In a league which has trumpeted itself as the most competitive in the world it took just two weeks for the rot to set in. Initially, the matches remained close, mainly because there were only ten league points separating Northampton in fourth place and Newcastle in tenth. This meant that ten clubs were in the chase for either a top four play-off place, or a top six finish for European Cup qualification.
However, by Round 16 on April 17/18 the fault-lines were in place, with the gap between Harlequins in fourth and Wasps in ninth having stretched to 19 league points.
With five rounds left to play after this weekend, the incentive for a third of the league, the bottom four clubs – Wasps, Newcastle, Gloucester, and Worcester (31 league points below Harlequins) – has evaporated.
This has been highlighted by a glut of matches in recent weeks with yawning-chasm scorelines rather than the tight margins, often by seven points or less, which characterised results before the end of relegation. The story it tells is that defence has become optional with
some teams, rather than compulsory.
Here are some of the basketball scorelines. Round 14: Harlequins 59 Gloucester 24 (35 point margin); Sale 41 London Irish 13 (28 point margin); Bath 47 Worcester 22 (25 point margin); and Exeter 47 Leicester 31 (16 point margin).
Round 15: Northampton 62 Worcester 14 (48 point margin), and then last weekend in Round 16: Harlequins 50 Worcester 26 (24 point margin); Northampton 44 London Irish 26 (18 point margin); Bristol 34 Newcastle 17 (17 point margin); and Exeter 43 Wasps 13 (30 point margin).
The most telling commentary of the lot came from Lee Blackett, as the Wasps head coach reflected on his team’s second-half defensive capitulation against Exeter. Blackett, who is a clear, measured, and usually upbeat communicator, could not hide his disappointment with his team.
“The thing we are not proud of at all is the way we rolled over towards the back end of that game. We (were) sat there at 22-13, and got a lineout with 18 minutes to go on the clock, and the scoreline just cannot end up how it ended up. For 50 minutes we’re going well... we’ll look at ourselves and how we rolled over, because that’s just not us.”
If the misguided money men who are trying to turn the Premiership into a closed shop get their way, this is the shape of things to come not just for Wasps, but for the league as a whole – and, just as they did with Super Rugby in the southern hemisphere, the fans will walk away.
The Premiership owners have to be told as forcefully as their European Super League counterparts have been, that their manipulation of this game to provide them with a ring-fenced investment at the expense of the competitive, meritbased league that is so valuable to English rugby fans, will not stand.
“The way in which the Premiership is being devalued is already writ large”