No complaints from me about rotation – I love it
Chris Foy wrote a piece in the Daily Mail
lamenting what he perceived as the decline in quality of Premiership rugby as the league strives to catch up after the Covid suspension. He described some fixtures as devalued, but I’m not sure diehard fans see it that way.
Looking at the forums, it seems to me fans are enjoying a lot about the Premiership’s return. First they’re just glad to have some proper rugby back, even if they can’t attend games. They’re enjoying all of the matches being televised, and seeing younger and squad players getting their chance to shine.
We’re also learning a lot about how the clubs are coached – look at the Saracens second XV in action and you’ll see a mini-version of their first team, playing the same way, and with the same passion.
Foy says the reputation of the league is being damaged by clubs having to heavily rotate their squad, but I would counter that having so many games televised promotes Premiership rugby to a wider audience, and I bet you that when the 2020-21 season starts, people will miss having midweek matches.
Come the new season the big names will return, and the squad players will spend their time holding tackle bags and wondering where their next game will come from – good, and potentially great, young English players will be left on the sidelines, and that’s a crying shame.
Foy mentions the recent Leicester Tigers encounter with Bath, describing it rightly as a ‘famous rivalry’, of which there are many among the 13 Premiership clubs. However, if you’re a fan who pays to go to games, and buys a replica shirt to demonstrate your loyalty to your club, you will support the 23 players your head coach fields – I dispute that the star players are as important as some believe. There’s a fundamental issue here, and I believe it’s critical to the Premiership’s future success, maybe even its survival.
There is the Steve Lansdown view, expressed in his open letter back in May, ‘To continue to drive the commercial growth of the game, we must keep the best players in the Premiership. The right high-profile internationals encourage investment, appeal to new audiences and aid team performance’.
But is that right? I believe that he misunderstands the psyche of the dyed-in-the-wool rugby fan. What they want, first and foremost, is for their club – which has often been around for 150 years – to survive for a long, long time so that their kids and grandkids can follow it. If you look at the Crumbie terrace at Welford Road, or the Shed at Kingsholm, there are people standing in the same spot they stood when their father or grandfather first took them to a game. That’s the heart and soul of English club rugby.
A wise owner recently said he regarded himself as a caretaker looking after the club for a decade or maybe longer, before passing the baton on to someone else. Remember Sir Robin Day’s famous interview where he referred to John Nott as a ‘here-today, gone-tomorrow’ politician – so it is with rugby, owners come and go, but great clubs stand the test of time.
For diehard supporters, the derby matches will be just as hard fought as ever, irrespective of which players take the field, and to suggest that a couple of highly-paid marquee players will make a difference to this ancient enmity is to misunderstand its appeal.
I would dearly love to see squad rotation becoming a fundamental part of the way the Premiership works. If we are serious about player welfare, then every club need a bigger squad, so players can get the correct amount of rest.
Bristol Bears’ statement after the sham salary cap cut was announced said, ‘We believe the Premiership should foster and encourage ambition, while ensuring that clubs show financial prudence and planning’. For me those last four words mean living within their means, and the level of salary cap which would achieve that is much lower than the current, or the temporarily modified one.
Some have suggested that the play-offs should be scrapped this year, thereby at a stroke making these current matches utterly irrelevant. No, that must not happen – we want a winner, and it will be the team that manage their resources most professionally, and where the coaches have adapted best to these unprecedented times, skewed of course by the unfairness of having marquee players who make a mockery of the salary cap.