Makes no sense to relegate Saracens
Sometimes we have to push our prejudices or our desire for revenge to one side, and think about rugby’s greater good. To use what has become a cliché, these are ‘unprecedented’ times, and need a very different way of thinking. It’s time for the Premiership owners to act.
Yesterday, Saracens played Leinster in a Champions Cup quarter-final, but next season are destined to play in English rugby’s second tier – not, of course, because they failed on the pitch, but because they transgressed in the boardroom.
When things were normal, or at any rate what passed for normal in the Premiership’s machinations, this was something that could be justified: they’d broken the rules and they needed to be punished. The way that their punishment was handed down was typically hamfisted, but you won’t find many people who disagreed that something needed to happen.
Twelve months in the Championship was probably fair, as it ensured they’d be deprived of Champions Cup rugby for at least two seasons. However, then Covid-19 struck, and all bets were off.
Currently we don’t know what the state of the RFU Championship will be next season. Will teams that were professional go semipro, will teams that harboured even tentative aspirations to make it to the Premiership still think that way, and will all of the Championship clubs even survive? Yet, even though the landscape has changed in an unrecognisable way, it is still the plan to dump Saracens there. That makes no sense.
Can you imagine what might happen if a Saracens front row comes up against that of one of the lesser, possibly semi-pro, Championship sides? It’s a deeply scary thought. Some people are moaning about mismatches in this current congested end to the Premiership season – well, if Sarries are in the Championship you’ll see cricket scores notched up. That will not be good for anyone.
It is time to push spite to one side, and consider what is best for the Premiership which is struggling to survive in its present form. Any organisation that can dole out two 35-point deductions is capable of reconsidering whether that punishment now fits the crime. Take away the vindictiveness and there is a compelling case for a 13team Premiership which includes Saracens – additional matches which hopefully at some stage will be in front of decent-sized crowds, a rest for one team every weekend, more television revenue, and so on.
The current rugby world is totally different from how it was when the 70point penalty was handed out back in January – noone could have predicted where we would be today. I am absolutely not suggesting that Sarries go unpunished but this is the clearest case I’ve ever seen of an organisation cutting off its nose to spite its face. Find a way of including Sarries in next season’s Premiership, but also severely punish them for their crimes – the most obvious one is a lengthy ban from European competition.
I could make a case that no Champions Cup rugby for three or four years would hurt them much more than the token 12 months in the Championship, and Sarries’ inability to qualify for Europe would also clear a space for another English club.
It would be interesting to see which option Saracens would prefer: 12 months in the Championship or a lengthy ban from Europe? I reckon they’d go for the former as they know it will hurt them less!
Last Monday we saw the match between Gloucester and Harlequins played with a ‘crowd’ of 1,000 home fans in attendance. It was an odd, almost sinister, spectacle, and while it was great that it wasn’t an empty stadium, it seemed to raise more questions than answers.
Clearly I was wrong to assume that the 1,000 present would be spaced all around the ground, because they weren’t. They were spread around one end of the grandstand, with the other end empty, as was the famous Shed. To an outsider it looked as though the fans were seated close together, but a spokesman assures me that wasn’t the case. There’s a ‘Green Guide’, published by the Sports Grounds Safety Authority, that helps clubs determine their safe capacity, and Gloucester’s plan had to be signed off by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS), and by the City Council.
The club passed the test so it was a small but positive step on the road to some sort of a new normality, with two more games now scheduled to take place in front of 1,000 fans. With Gloucester’s owner, Martin St Quinton, and Exeter’s Tony Rowe, agreeing they need 8,000 to 10,000 fans in the ground to make rugby viable, we’re a long way from solving the Premiership’s problems, but we should be thankful for small mercies.
“A lengthy ban from Europe would hurt Sarries more than a year in Championship”