IN CASE YOU WERE ASLEEP cont...

“Oh, that World League,” said World Rugby. “Oh no we weren’t selling it. Just getting it valued.” “And having the USA in it was just one of many ideas we had valued.” “That wasn’t why we had a secret meeting in the USA in February where we didn’t invite Fiji who we told in November were going to be in the World League.” “And we didn’t invite the players to the USA for that meeting either, only because we were discussing financial things that they aren’t clever enough to understand.” “Oh sorry, because we were discussing financial things that we didn’t want them to know in case they worked out we aren’t paying them anywhere near enough.” “Sorry, sorry...that’s not it. We lost their email address.” “Look. we totally refute the allegation that we didn’t want them there because they had already told us the concept sucked and we didn’t want them to know it sucked even more with the USA in and Fiji out.” “But look the good news in all this is that those of us with our snouts in the trough are going to be travelling to even more places for free and having a ball.” “No, no sorry what we meant is that the players are going to be really well looked after in this proposal and have more time off than they have ever had.” “Because most of them will be almost permanently injured.” “Oops, our bad again...what we mean is that we take player welfare seriously.” “But of course if a TV company comes along with a huge pile of cash, we have to ask ourselves just how seriously we take player welfare.” “And it’s quite a big pile of cash that this company has turned up with and so we have concluded we don’t take player welfare seriously at all.” “Like, a really big pile of cash, so of course we can’t be expected to turn it down because of a little thing like the players saying it will just about kill them.”