Visionary Wyman was beaten to the punch

COVENTRY fixture secretary Alf Wyman was a rugby visionary, well before his time in many respects as a strong advocate of sponsorship and league rugby.

But to the blazers at Twickenham, the former Coventry hooker – the brains behind the Anglo-Welsh ‘Super League’ – must have seemed like the anti-Christ.

In the summer of 1975, Wyman invited all the leading clubs within a 120-mile radius of Bristol to a meeting to discuss plans for an Anglo-Welsh club competition for the 1976-77 season.

Thirteen sides from England said they would join up – some after much persuasion – and seven from the other side of the Seven Bridge said they were in.

The English sides were Bath, Bedford, Blackheath, Bristol, Coventry, Gloucester, Harlequins – who later withdrew their support – Leicester, London Welsh, Moseley, Northampton, Richmond and Rosslyn Park; while from Wales Aberavon, Bridgend, Cardiff (but not in the first season as they were preoccupied with their centenary), Llanelli, Neath, Newport and Swansea said they would participate.

The idea was that they would compete in a merit table based on nominated fixtures against each other with the table being decided on a percentage of games won.

The Twickenham hierarchy dreaded the word ‘ league’. Scotland had started one, and Wales were considering a move in the same direction.

Northern clubs had tried unsuccessfully in the late 1960s to introduce a league when the Union blocked it and RFU president Tarn Bainbridge branded it a selective competition.

Saints legend Geoff Allen, who was appointed the first chief executive in Rugby Union weeks before the game turned professional, says the RFU would do anything in their power to keep the game amateur.

“Alf was well before his time,” says Allen. “He was a lovely man who had some great ideas, and that was one of his ideas. I remember speaking to once at a Midland Counties meeting about it.

“The RFU were the last bastions of amateurism; when the game went professional, the only people who didn’t have any thought on professionalism were the Rugby Football Union. They didn’t know what to do even though they had two people on the IRB Council who decided the game was going professional; they were the most ill-prepared people.

“Because the RFU were so against professional rugby, they hadn’t foreseen what was going to happen when the game went professional.They were against what smacked of professionalism in the mid-70s, and it lasted until the mid-nineties.”

However, the more momentum Wyman’s idea gathered, the more interest it drew from the media and the Daily Mail took it upon themselves to introduce a merit table, using the format that Wyman had been proposing for the following season and published results and the league table every Monday.

The RFU belatedly accepted the idea and introduced official area merit tables the following season, sidelining Wyman in the process.