County Championship reaches crossroads
AS Cornwall prepares to celebrate the 30th anniversary of its most famous win in the County Championship on Tuesday, the very future of the competition remains up for discussion.
The RFU’s Community Game Board has commissioned an independent review of the men’s, women’s and U20s County Championship, with counties, clubs, players, coaches, volunteers and match officials asked for their views as part of the process.
Feedback from the survey will then be considered by the County Championship Working Review Group.
Once the main steppingstone to international honours, the status of the County Championship, which began in 1889, has declined dramatically in the professional era and is now seen by many in the game as an after-thought, shoe-horned in at the end of a busy league season.
However, it still has ardent supporters, not least in Cornwall and Lancashire, where without the presence of a Premiership club, the county side is seen as the pinnacle for semi-pro and amateur players.
Northampton and Fiji hooker Sam Matavesi and Gloucester prop Jamal Ford-Robinson are two examples of players who used the County Championship to put themselves in the shop window.
Cornwall are reigning county champions, having beaten Cheshire at Twickenham in 2019, and have reached six of the last seven finals. But coronavirus means they have not been able to defend the Bill Beaumont Cup for the last two years.
Alan Milliner, Cornwall’s RFU Council representative is part of the 11-strong Working Group and says he will fight “tooth and nail” to preserve the competition as a mainstay of the English rugby season.
“I am 100 per cent supporting the County Championship, because it is the way to go. It is a genuine player pathway and I don’t want it gone,” Milliner said. “At the moment it is very much about exploring what options we’ve got.
“We might have to change the format; we might have to regionalise it more, and there is the issue of playing at Twickenham…there are all sorts of things in the mix. But we haven’t reached that point yet where we can make any decisions because that will go to Council towards the end of this year.
“One option could be that we knock the County Championship on the head but my impression is that is not on the table, it’s very much about how best we can make it work.”
Milliner was part of the Trelawny Army, estimated to number 40,000, that travelled en masse to Twickenham, on April 20, 1991, and made up a record 56,000 crowd for a County Championship final, when Cornwall famously beat Yorkshire 29-20 after extra time.
It prompted Bill Bishop, Cornwall’s RFU representative at the time, to say, “Will the last one out of Cornwall, please switch off the lights!”