>> Cain: Prem treatment of Gatland is shameful
THE Premiership is on its way to becoming the biggest pariah in Rugby Union. Hallmarks of its blinkered, divisive selfishness, highlighted by its ring-fencing agenda, have surfaced again in its latest fight with the British & Irish Lions.
The Premiership owners group and their hapless chief executive, Darren Childs, seem to have an obsession with showing the Lions who’s boss in the never-ending northern hemisphere wrangle over club and international playing windows and player release.
At some stage the RFU will wake up to the public reaching for the offbutton as the Premiership snares this sport in another interminable administrative feud.
The latest argument started with Lions head coach Warren Gatland using the announcement of his coaching group this week to warn Premiership clubs that their stance of denying the touring side training access to players in English top tier clubs once the domestic fixtures are finished in June, could backfire on their chances of winning Lions selection.
Gatland’s exasperated comments were aimed mainly at the Premiership’s refusal to release players until after its final on June 26. This is even though eight English clubs will finish their season a fortnight earlier, and have players available for the Lions’ ten-day training camp, while two more clubs will be in the same position after the play-offs a week later.
Gatland has told the Premiership more than once over the past year that unavailability for Lions training could impact selection. It is disingenuous for the Premiership to say it has not been informed – and it is playing parish-pump politics with the careers of every England international who is a Lions candidate, as well as internationals from the other Home Unions playing for English clubs.
These include Gloucester’s Louis Rees-Zammit, Northampton’s Dan
Biggar (both Wales), Exeter’s Stuart Hogg and Jonny Gray, Gloucester’s Chris Harris, and Bath’s Cameron Redpath (all Scotland), as well as Bristol’s Callum Sheedy (Wales).
As things stand, Childs is playing the role of jailer by refusing the Lions access to players no longer required by their clubs because it gives the Premiership the chance to squeeze more money out of the Lions for so-called early release under the pretext of proving a point about “encroaching” on Premiership territory.
The idea of the Lions having to battle the clubs of one of its main constituent parts – the RFU – for access to players shows the Premiership, and the toothless national governing body, in the worst light possible.
Gatland should not have to bargain with Premiership clubs who are already being paid around £65,000 for each Lions player, especially when they are no longer required by their clubs. Players not only earn a further c. £65,000 each, but those who rise to the occasion return home with box-office appeal.
Putting barriers in the way of the Lions is the politics of a sporting madhouse, which is what professional rugby in England is fast becoming.
The Lions is meant to be a joint venture – and adventure – which benefits the whole of British and Irish rugby. It has established itself through its extraordinary history as the gold standard of the game in these islands, and has arguably the biggest and most devoted touring following in sport. Win or lose, Lions tours are invariably great sporting theatre, and the uplift after a victorious series is of Cape Canaveral proportions.
It is why supporting the Lions should be a no-brainer. Instead, the only conclusion any bystander can draw is that the Premiership owners are consumed by jealousy when 30,000 red-shirted Lions fans are prepared to put a hole in their life savings to travel to the far-flung reaches of the southern hemisphere.
It suggests that they find the prospect of the Lions putting the Premiership in the shade, albeit temporarily, too much to bear.
The narrative so far from the Premiership is that it is all the fault of the Lions. No one should buy that line, because it is a complete misrepresentation.
The genesis of the dispute stems from the San Francisco Accord, which took place in California in January 2017. The remit of this World Rugby meeting was to create a global calendar, and among its main aims was “harmonising the relationship between the international and domestic games”. It has failed utterly in both those missions, and has put the Lions in an untenable position. This is because World Rugby did not invite the Lions, despite having respected former coaches like Sir Ian McGeechan to call on.
Instead, the Home Unions were represented by RFU chief executive Ian Ritchie and his Irish counterpart Phillip Browne, neither of whom had first-hand knowledge of the dynamics of Lions tours. Nor, for that matter, did World Rugby chairman Bill Beaumont. Despite being a former Lions tourist and captain (1977, 1980), Beaumont’s amateur era experience was divorced from the player release and time complexities of the pro era.
The upshot is the mess we have now. In a nutshell, the club season in the northern hemisphere has been extended by a month from the end of May to the end of June, and with international tours packed into July, San Francisco delivered an 11-month season which rammed the Lions into a five-week window.
This is a week less than the 2017 tour to New Zealand, and two weeks less than it was in 1997. Gatland’s tour reports after he coached the Lions to a winning series over Australia in 2013, and the drawn series against the All Blacks, argued passionately for no more cuts – but having been ignored by the suits at World Rugby, he is stuck between a rock and a hard place.
The difference is that whereas the
PRO14 has been sympathetic to the difficulties foisted on the Lions in San Francisco, moving its final forward a week, the Premiership – which was represented at the meeting by Bath owner Bruce Craig and former chief executive Mark McCafferty – has refused to budge.
It’s not difficult to understand Gatland’s frustration, and it is why he did not mince words in the Press briefing. “It’s a waste of time doing a tour report every four years. I don’t know who reads it… for some reason things don’t really change.”
He added that the constraints of the pandemic have impacted on all rugby. “It looks like the Lions are going to lose money, so we’re all in the same boat – and I don’t know why everything has to come down to dollar signs. The Lions have been brilliant at compensating clubs in the past, and I know that’s the plan again. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to ask for players to come in to help our preparation once they’ve finished with their club side. I don’t know why there has to be an extra payment for that.”
Nor does anyone who values the Lions – and the Premiership owners have made it clear they are not in that number.
“Putting barriers in way of the Lions is the politics of a sporting madhouse”