Met Police out to mark centenary in fine style
ONE year out from its centenary, Metropolitan Police RFC and police rugby in general is enjoying something of a revival.
Back in the amateur days, the Met Police and South Wales Police boasted a fixture list that was the envy of most club sides and included matches against Saracens, Leicester and Harlequins for the London cops and Cardiff, Llanelli and Swansea for their Welsh colleagues.
And when Leagues were introduced in England in 1987, the Met Police started life in Division 3 and finished the season just outside of the top 30 clubs in the country, while South Wales Police went straight into Division 1 when Wales went down the same route three years later.
But the demands of a League season combined with the increasing scrutiny of the Police, and leadership that didn’t see the value of sport as part of policing’s core values, or indeed a recruiting tool, led to an irreversible drop-off in the numbers and quality of police rugby players. Many players diverted their loyalty to clubs which would pay them, or offer other perks for their commitment.
It got to the point, in 2004, where the Met Police withdrew from the League structure altogether. Happily, some of those involved were determined to arrest the decline and now, 18 years on, the future looks much brighter, as Met Police RFC Hon Secretary and former captain and team manager, Gavin Bolton explains.
“We kept going with four fixtures or so a year between 2004 and 2010, and it got to a stage where we entered a Merit Table in 2010 and then re-entered the Leagues.
“We started at the very bottom rung of the ladder and we are now back to the point we came out of the Leagues, at the equivalent of the old Surrey 1, and we are really proud of that.
“We have got our Centenary next year, we’ve got a first team, a second
team, and a thriving women’s section that is starting to follow the same model as the men’s side 12 years ago. We have an active touch rugby programme and, back in May, we were in the final of the National Police Cup, losing in the last couple of minutes to South Wales.”
Bolton, a former Harlequins and Sutton & Epsom hooker, captained Met Police in his younger days and has also served as team manager.
If Met Police RFC had been allowed to disappear from the rugby map altogether, it would have left him screaming blue murder.
“I’ve been involved in police rugby from the age of 20 and I am now 41. I’ve pretty much grown it,” he said.
“It is not too audacious for me to say I didn’t want to lose police sports in the way that it was in danger of being lost because the senior managers in the organisations weren’t very service orientated and didn’t believe what the public wanted us to be doing with our time.
“But we have come full circle now and are realising that actually engaging with communities and showing that we are humans, that we are just members of the public, is aligned to the Peelian principle of ‘the public are the police and the police are the public’. That is so important now with trust and confidence. The medium of sport, especially rugby because of the values, is far more on the agenda, and that’s where the crossover comes,
“You look at places like Northamptonshire, Cambridgeshire, Cheshire … they’ve all just recently started police rugby sections.”