Revive the County Cup or scrap it
The Bill Beaumont County Championship begins in May. What ought to be the climax to the season for the best players at grassroots clubs will be nothing of the sort. As usual.
The fixture list shows 26 counties entered. Depending on results, 17 of those may have just a single home match and several will play just two games in total.
Middlesex, plus Notts, Lincs & Derby, do not take part at all. Their committees have taken unilateral decisions to deny their best players any chance of playing representative rugby. Given how other counties have, at different times, chosen to opt out with no apparent sanction from the RFU, those two counties are likely to escape without penalty, bringing the day when the County Championship dies ever closer.
The RFU website gives no indication of the competition format, or of whether or when there will be semi-finals and finals. The format in recent seasons has involved three separate cups, with the final for the most junior of those kicking off just after breakfast on a Sunday morning at a deserted Twickenham. It is as if the RFU would happily see county senior rugby die.
The RFU are unlikely to ever make a positive decision to scrap county senior rugby. That would alienate the hundreds of county volunteers who are responsible for disciplinary committees, referee appointments, local leagues, identifying young talent for age-group squads, etc. If those volunteers were not even given a token County Championship for adult players in their county, many might decide to withdraw. The entire structure of English rugby could then be on shaky foundations.
Some current England internationals still often take their first steps up the ladder via county agegroup squads. If senior county rugby withered away, the future could be bleak for those vital squads.
Premiership clubs have links with nearby counties to identify recruits for their academies. Yet those self-interested clubs sometimes treat their feeder counties with disdain. A few seasons ago, Saracens played a ‘home’ European fixture in Brussels, rather than in one of the counties supplying their academy. Last autumn Newcastle took a home Premiership match to Philadelphia rather than, say, to Durham or Cumbria.
Counties seem content to accept this shabby treatment in the same way as they accept the RFU’s failure to give them a logically-formatted County Championship. For some counties to play just twice in a four or fiveweek county window is absurd. Nothing will change if counties do not ‘stick up for themselves’.
The decision of two counties to pull out also denies their most talented players the opportunity to earn selection for England Counties on their annual overseas tour which does excellent work in flying the flag in countries with no great rugby tradition. The England Counties concept cannot logically continue if there is no County Championship from which to select players.
There is no going back to the days when England internationals could emerge from modest clubs via county rugby. The influence of Premiership Rugby will ensure that is impossible. But that should not prevent the RFU from giving the best players at the hundreds of clubs below the top tier a proper domestic representative stage.
The result of not providing such an outlet is that many counties underachieve horribly.
The RFU must either introduce a plan to see if county senior rugby might still have a future; or be honest and scrap it.