Bristol win Leiua race
WHILE Saturday’s 50-point defeat at Exeter ended Wasps’ interest in this season’s Anglo-Welsh Cup, for a good number of rugby fans it was never actually there in the first place.
The idea of renewing traditional cross-border rivalries between English Premiership clubs and their Welsh counterparts seemed a good idea when the competition began in 2005.
It replaced rugby’s equivalent of the FA Cup, which had variously been sponsored by John Player, Pilkington and Powergen.
Meanwhile, at the next level down, the British & Irish Cup was created to bring the likes of Pontypridd and London Scottish back into playing contact.
Although two Anglo-Welsh matches are televised live and a highlights package is shown late on Sunday evening, the fact that neither competition has a sponsor probably tells us all we need to know about their inability to catch the rugby zeitgeist.
A big crowd saw Leicester’s second team beat their Northampton counterparts on Saturday, but in truth 15,000 would turn up at Welford Road to watch 15 Tigers shirts drying on a washing line.
Elsewhere, interest is much more hit-and-miss, despite pricing initiatives to encourage new and less regular fans to sample the sport.
Like its football equivalent, English rugby’s cup competition largely takes place without big name stars, who are either resting or preparing for the Six Nations with their national squads, which instantly labels it second-tier.
So it is perhaps unsurprising that the competition is unloved, and that calls to scrap it are routinely heard. After all, if no-one wants to watch it or sponsor it, and the clubs are fielding shadow sides since their top performers already play too much rugby, why bother?
This might eventually be the best answer, but as with so many things it is not that simple, since this muchmaligned competition sits at the heart of the wider debate about English rugby’s future direction.
While the England team is winning, and high-octane Premiership and European Cup matches draw ever-bigger crowds and TV profile, it is easy to think that everything in the garden is rosy.
But just below the surface, the Championship is riddled with stories of young men whose lives have been changed - and not for the better - by attempting to live a professional rugby dream which lack of income, pastoral care and health insurance have brutally scuppered.
And if the RFU have undermined their own half-hearted attempt to build a second Rugby Reporter full-time league that underpins the Premiership (and England team) by not allocating the 12 clubs involved a big enough slice of their enormous financial pie, the story another level down is even worse.
Coventry. Moseley and their National One counterparts receive only a few grand of travel expenses each year, despite the presence of many dual-registered international under 20 players in the league. Only Twickenham’s myopic big-wigs could view a competition that requires Plymouth to travel to Blaydon as being part of the same ‘community game’ as Old Coventrians Wheatleyans. According to Moseley chairman Dave Warren, over 600 professional players attached to the top 24 Premiership and Championship clubs did not take the field in the last round of league games. The need to provide match action for these squad players is why the second tier A League and AngloWelsh competitions exist, even though they seemingly serve little other purpose. When there was no AngloWelsh competition following last season’s World Cup, for example, the likes of Wasps’ James Downey, Jamie Stevenson and Alex Lozowski played next to no rugby.
The proponents of change go on to suggest that topflight clubs could operate with smaller primary squads, while formally linking up with feeder clubs at levels two and three, to get more of the better English players on the field.
In turn this would also allow a more equitable split of the available central funding, since the costs involved in developing younger players would be shared around a wider base of clubs. A good against Old plan? Maybe, maybe not...
This approach would require at best the curtailment, and at worst the end, of promotion and relegation between the Premiership, Championship and National One, as otherwise biting the hand that feeds becomes a clear issue. Is this end of hope a price aspiring clubs and fallen giants are willing to pay? In addition, the development of the most talented 18 to 21-year-olds is currently the responsibility of the 12 Premiership academies, where full-time coaches, analysts, conditioners and medics work with around a dozen players apiece on a five-dayper-week basis.
Extending this support structure to a wider number of clubs clearly makes no financial or rugby sense, so while (to create a Midlands example) Wasps may be formally linked with Coventry and playing in the Championship, the academy age players would still spend their working week at one centre, and effectively with a different club to that which they represent on a Saturday.
Professional rugby may be into its third decade, but the growing pains are still being felt... Mark Tainton.