Japan has a yen for showing clubs matter

ALL that publicity about the setting up of a new “global” 12-a-side tournament and positioning it as rugby’s answer to cricket’s IPL has been exposed for the pie-inthe-sky nonsense it was – not by a downbeat assessment of its practicalities by the governing class, but by the decision of three top-end Wallabies to skip the autumn international series.

Union’s IPL already exists, in the form of the newly revamped and heavily re-financed elite club competition in Japan. How else to explain the absence of Quade Cooper, Samu Kerevi and Sean McMahon from the Australian party about to visit Murrayfield, Twickenham and Cardiff ?

The players have been quite open about it: torn between travelling to Europe with their countrymen and sticking with their principal paymasters in the Land of the Rising Sums, they are staying Out East.

Which puts the sport in an interesting place, to say the least. The southern hemisphere superpowers have spent many a long year pointing angry fingers at the club leagues in England and France, accusing them of tearing filthy great holes in the fabric of the sport with their recruitment policies.

Will the same criticism be levelled at the Japanese, the new darlings of the game, on the grounds that they are muscling in with their cheque books in precisely the same way as the Premiership and the Top 14?

And where does this leave the dinosaur argument about the “primacy of international rugby”? At the risk of beating the same old drum louder than John Bonham on steroids, the suited and booted committee types who claim to run rugby for the benefit of everyone had better start dealing with the club movement as equals rather than serfs.