REBOOT REQUIRED...
As rugby struggles to get going again, Sir Clive Woodward and Martin Johnson join our experts to suggest revolutionary ideas to save the sport when it re-emerges
We need to forget about international rugby until next year.
The sport must build from the bottom upwards, like football is doing. Get the club game going again, get the european Cup up and running in some format and only then think about the Six Nations, summer tours and autumn Tests.
I say this with absolutely no pleasure but the game is in a real mess over attempts to get internationals restarted — it should not even be the priority.
A full-contact sport like rugby is going to be the last cab off the rank with regards to playing again as we are seeing with the premiership clubs’ problems just resuming training. I’m struggling to get my head around how and when we will be allowed to play again. It’s surely going to need a massive change of emphasis from the Government in what is and isn’t allowed.
I think — as I did from the start — that we should put a lid on the 2020 Six Nations. There is just no way games are going to be staged in Dublin, Rome and paris any time soon. equally, it is pointless trying to rearrange lost summer tours. They have gone for ever.
If there is any meaningful rugby in october it has to be club rugby — premiership, pro14, T14 — because there is a real danger of clubs going out of business if they don’t get some revenue streams going very soon.
With all due respect to the home unions, their borrowing power is greater. They might get horribly stretched but they will not go out of business. The clubs will, though, and without the clubs, Test rugby ceases to exist. You must keep the pyramid in place.
And from a moral standpoint, the clubs must have the first call on players anyway.
We learned last week that 99 premiership players are paid £300,000 or more. The clubs are the primary employers, not the unions, and must have the first call on their services. owen Farrell, who would be one of the 24 premiership players earning more than £598,000, has been available for just over 30 per cent of Saracens games in recent seasons. It will be a similar case with other star names. The clubs are not getting value for money.
TIME for a liberation. Rugby needs to de-clutter and become a more open, vibrant spectacle. Most people in the game agree urgent change is required to drive interest and revenue — and it might have to be radical change.
There is simply not enough space out there. It has all become far too crowded and stifling. Attacking talent is largely suffocated in this era of defensive ‘line-speed’, which is often a euphemism for being offside.
The sport has come to place a disproportionate emphasis on size and power. It is a collision-based contest across the field. There are still flashes of speed and flair, but the staple is raw physicality, which has made the game savagely punishing for elite-level participants. Traditionalists might want to look away — but how about reducing the numbers? Make it 12 or 13 a side. Seriously. Create more space to run free. Modern players are so fit they are able to crush creativity as effectively as a team of 17 or 18 back in the amateur era.
This is not a call to blur the lines between the codes and turn union into league. There should still be proper scrummaging — but with a determined effort to banish the endless resets and crooked put-ins.
Rugby needs to open up, to enhance its appeal. It might upset the purists to talk about reducing on-field numbers, but there are not enough of those purists to prop up the finances of the sport in this professional age.
There is an urgent need to entice new viewers and, let’s be frank, they are not drawn to any spectacle featuring piles of muddy bodies tussling over a hidden ball.
Mauls and messy rucks do not draw vast crowds or armchair viewers. Such is the difficulty in legitimately defending mauls — and the near-inevitability of tries via that method in the 22 — that there is an argument for doing away with them altogether. And the breakdown is a lawless shambles which requires urgent attention, although there are no easy solutions.
The sight of scrum-halves slowly retrieving the ball from the base of elongated ‘caterpillar’ rucks, ready to resume a prolonged box-kicking duel, might work for coaches seeking any advantage, but it does not work for an audience seeking entertainment.
Union has an identity to protect, of course. It should not become league, or Sevens. But it needs to be de- cluttered and liberated — to make it less damaging and more appealing.
I hope they are not going to start playing rugby in the northern hemisphere summer. That would be a disaster. It is not a summer game! people want to play rugby in the winter in this country.
We get a very short summer and people want to do other things rather than watch rugby. I think it would be totally the wrong thing to do.
The vast majority of people play rugby for fun. If I was at a rugby club and they talked about playing in the summer, I’d just say, “No, thank you”. Winter is when we are supposed to play.
There is no perfect answer to aligning the northern and southern hemispheres. I sometimes think we are in danger of destroying what we have — and the Lions is one of those things.
The schedule the guys had last time in New Zealand was ridiculous — it was incredible that they managed to do what they did.
There is more money in the game than ever, so where is it all going? If it is all going on wages, then you are paying too much. You have to cut your costs.
When the game went professional in 1996, I played for the biggest club in the country, Leicester. They had the biggest membership, the biggst crowds and probably the biggest commercial income.
When other clubs were throwing money around, I remember saying to my team- mates: ‘how can they afford that? They are on more than us.’
But they could not afford it and clubs went out of business. It has to be sustainable.
people have to be realistic and everyone has to take a hit. You are not immune from it.
Clubs are not playing games and they are suffering from a major loss of income, so it is desperate for a lot of people.
RUGBY is far too niche to be curmudgeonly and snooty — the sport must embrace radical, innovative changes to make it
SIR CLIVE WOODWARD SCRAP TOURS AND THE SIX NATIONS
CHRIS FOY CHANGE GAME TO 12 OR 13 PLAYERS A SIDE
MARTIN JOHNSON FORGET SUMMER SWITCH, IT’S A WINTER SPORT!
WILL KELLEHER BRING IN GADGETS AND GIZMOS