Richard Bath suggests club versus country battles may never end in the Northern Hemisphere.
RICHARD BATH IS AN AWARD- WINNING WRITER BASED IN THE UK.
Ever since the game went professional, the issue of club versus country has remained the boil that has stubbornly refused to be lanced.
No sooner has the issue been temporarily addressed in one country than the contagion breaks out in another. In Europe, only Ireland, where the ground rules were set early, has remained a relative oasis of peace.
The most bloody battlefield at the moment is across Offa’s Dyke in Wales, where the nation’s rugby administrators would win more gold medals than Ian Thorpe if infighting were ever to become an Olympic discipline.
Even by the fruity standards of their constant internecine strife, however, the current rammy over the issue of central contracts – basically who controls the top players - has become spectacularly savage. So much so, in fact, that it’s beginning to genuinely hamper the running of rugby as a serious professional sport in one of its traditional heartlands.
In past issues this column has described the genesis of the conflict, how the Welsh Rugby Union has pushed its professional clubs to the brink of bankruptcy, behaving like some lumpen playground bully as it used its dominant position to pound nominally independent entities which are completely dependant upon handouts from the paymaster in Cardiff.
But if things have long been tricky, now they’ve become so poisonous that the relationship between the four clubs and the WRU has broken down to the extent where Wales’s captain may have nowhere to play in the forthcoming season and Wales may struggle to field an even remotely competitive side against the Springboks in Cardiff on November 29. Indeed, unless there is change soon after long months of deadlock, Wales’ four professional rugby clubs, who say they are preparing for life “without any form of WRU support or involvement”, may also be unable to field competitive sides in this year’s Pro 12 League or in the European Rugby Champions Cup, the successor to the Heineken Cup.
Basically, if the cash from the WRU dries up, the four clubs say they will face an annual financial shortfall of £ 6.7m ( NZ$ 13m) which means they will have to slash their wage bills, leaving them facing the prospect of letting their top players go.
With few released players able to find a club at this stage of the season, the WRU may be strong- armed into continuing the central grant given to the clubs, but even then the clubs insist they will still refuse to release any of their players for a South Africa game which falls outside of the test window.
The situation is even more acute for Wales skipper Sam Warburton. The only player to sign one of the central contracts that were so energetically pushed by national coach Warren Gatland, the openside now finds himself without a club because the four regional clubs, including his own Cardiff Blues, have legally committed themselves to not playing any player who has signed a central contract until the current impasse has been settled to the clubs’ satisfaction.
With French squads already settled and Aviva Premiership clubs barred from signing any centrally contracted players, the pickings for Warburton in World Cup year look pretty damned slim.
The carnage caused by the mismanagement, brinksmanship and all- round lack of good faith in Welsh rugby is in danger of plunging the game there into a downward spiral. Infighting and a lack of common purpose has led to a gradual fall- off in competitiveness and a loss of disenchanted players, which has in turn led to dwindling crowds and less resources to keep the marque players capable of putting bums on seats.
So poor has the financial prognosis become for the four clubs that their owners have asked the WRU to make them an offer to buy all four clubs. So far none has been forthcoming: whether or not that’s because the WRU thinks it will soon be able to pick them up for nothing is a moot point. Elsewhere, all is sweetness and light when compared with the situation in Wales, but there remain some promising sideshows with the capacity for real ructions between clubs and unions.
In England, for example, Bath thought that the RFU were on board with their courtship of NRL superstar Sam Burgess, only to find that the Union liked the idea of having Burgess available for the World Cup but didn’t fancy coughing up for the privilege.
An unamused Bath owner Bruce Craig still went ahead and stumped up the £ 500,000 ( NZ$ 1m) needed to secure Burgess’s services from the South Sydney Rabbitohs, and his coach Mike Ford promptly decided that in all likelihood Burgess will be appearing for the West Country side as a backrow player rather than the No 12 England desperately need.
Cue plenty of wooing from Twickenham, all of which has fallen on deaf ears at The Rec. Burgess doesn’t arrive in Bath until October, but this one already looks set to run and run.
The root of the problems in Wales and with Burgess, lies in the ever- expanding demands being put on the top players by clubs who want them to play more games, and by Unions who keep scheduling extra tests. As IRB chief executive Brett Gosper said: “There will always be friction between the club game and the game at international and union level. There’s a very crowded calendar, the players play for both constituencies, so there’s always going to be a tug- of- war.”
The signs that this tug- of- war will be stepped up over the coming months are everywhere. The top English clubs, for example, have followed up what was a victory over the replacement of the Heineken Cup with their own favoured successor by pushing for yet more change.
This time they want to establish – and control – what would almost certainly be a hugely lucrative World Club Cup. There are, however, a couple of small problems: they want to do so in June, which has been set aside for tests; and by June their players will surely be knackered.
As the pressure continues to build and players are caught in the middle between ambitious clubs and cash- hungry Unions, the losers are the players, whose welfare inevitably takes second place, and the smaller Unions whose influence eventually begins to wane as the cold hard facts of financial muscle exert an inevitable logic.
Just how the circle is completed – if it can be – is unclear. A global season makes sense, but devising one that works would test Solomon. Instead, we can expect more flashpoints as the demands increase on the top players, while clubs and country fight for the whip hand.
As in Wales, the challenge now is to deliver change without rugby itself becoming collateral damage.