Don’t only blame RFU for lack of confidence
IT WAS interesting to read last week’s comments by Simon Halliday in The Rugby Paper and how he passed the blame for a lack of confidence by the Championship investors onto the RFU. It is people like Cornish Pirates’ Dicky Evans (rather than the RFU) who have inspired hope in the Championship clubs by committing to long term financial backing, which has seen many clubs grow and build towards promotion to the Premiership, only to fail at the last post for numerous reasons.
Many of these reasons still exist but have been overridden by the current ring fence which blocks all from moving up, no matter where they finish in the Championship league.
Whether it is right to only blame the RFU is questionable, although if I remember correctly it has always been the clubs that have the right to ring fence their league if they all agree, meaning that any of the leagues can become closed shops if all the current clubs in it agree.
Obviously, aspirational clubs hoping to follow the idea that the RFU put forward when leagues were put in place with the promise of an open pathway to the top, plus increased funding as your club moved up the league, would discourage all but those unable to compete from ring fencing in the lower leagues.
Both the promises of an open pathway and increased funding having been broken in part by the RFU but also by the clubs themselves. The Premiership putting in its Minimum Standards Criteria blocks most clubs from promotion and the Professional Game Agreement (PGA)/Professional Game Partnership (PGP) taking most of the money available, which would have helped fund the promised increases in RFU funding contribution as clubs progressed up the league structure.
It was former CEO Ian Ritchie who almost doubled the amount that the Premiership Rugby (PRL) got for the PGA meaning it only needed a small fall in revenue for the RFU to have to divert funds from the rest of the game to fulfil their contracted funding agreement with the Premiership.
Given the situation over the past few years with Covid lockdowns, you would have thought the RFU would have sought to reduce their commitment to PRL and lower the PGP back to a realistic level that would enable funding to resume for all levels of the game.
However, that has not been the case and instead the money promised to PRL has increased by around 15 per cent with the new agreement worth a reported £235,000,000. This, given the fact that the Premiership is now a smaller league having lost three clubs, means even if the agreement had been kept at the previous level it would have given the remaining clubs roughly an extra £46,000,000 to share between them.
If the RFU were to revert back to funding levels in the pre Ritchie days, the game would be in a far healthier state with funding levels in all leagues of the game back to a sustainable level. After all, it is not just the professional game that needs help to keep going and grow the sport as even the relatively small amounts that were dished out to the lower leagues made a difference between survival and failure.
One of my old clubs, Streatham and Croydon RFC, are currently suffering from financial pressures that could see the club have to fold unless they get some financial help.
Streatham and Croydon was one of the stepping stones that took me from grassroots rugby to the top level of the game being a middle level club as Saracens were at the time. These were clubs who were able to get fixtures against the top clubs of the day who were like a cartel, rather similar to the ring fenced Premiership.
Playing for them certainly made a difference in my rugby career as it was for that club that I first played as the tighthead prop.
All throughout my school days, early club and county career, I was always played loosehead but just weeks before making the move to my first top club Richmond, our first team tighthead got injured and as the club were short of props I was asked to change sides which I did and played about 10 games as tighthead.
When I was leaving the club our coach Dennis Bedford said to me: “Jeff, good luck, I am sure you will make first team as a loosehead for Richmond but you are the best tighthead I have ever seen so think about changing sides” – which was obviously good advice.
I joined Richmond playing one game in the third team before moving up to the seconds, and after a few games making the first team loose-head which
I played for a
“Without stepping stone clubs, I would probably not have made it all the way to the top”
season and a half before moving to tighthead.
Starting back in the third team I quickly advanced to the first team and played for Surrey County and was selected on the bench for London Division against Australia. I got on the field and played against Cameron Lillicrap and it was after that game that I was asked to join Wasps and the rest is history. But without those stepping stone clubs and counties in the game it would probably never have happened.
So, if as Simon, below, says, the Championship needs to be included in the PGP finances, it should also be able to have its players selected for the England international team, which could be a better option than bringing back older players from across the Channel or Japan.