Inter-tier link-ups are the way ahead
The confirmation of a ‘strategic partnership’ between Harlequins and their nearby Championship side London Scottish – as revealed last month in TRP – should be the forerunner of similar deals between other clubs.
The Championship is by any standards a failing competition, and with the RFU unwilling or unable to fund it properly, and the clubs seemingly unable to attract the level of financing they need, then link-ups with Premiership clubs has to be the way forward.
I have always thought that the second-tier clubs ought to be feeder clubs for the top level, simply because it makes so much sense. From Quins’ point of view they see the benefit of being able to give game time to their young players and first teamers coming back from injury, while the telling phrase in the statement from London Scottish is that it will help them with their ‘longer-term strategy of continuing to play toplevel rugby in the Championship’.
That tacit acceptance that they won’t be a Premiership club is the dose of reality that some other Championship clubs would benefit from.
Of course, Ealing, despite their proximity to Quins and London Irish, want to be a Premiership club, and Doncaster – much more strategically placed in Yorkshire – share a similar ambition. That creates a real problem which will need to be tackled at some point: a 14-team Premiership would be great, but if the Championship then has just one, or maybe two, teams that fancy top-flight rugby, how will promotion and relegation realistically work? My answer is that it won’t, but beyond that I don’t have an answer to how that circle can be squared.
Quins and Scottish are geographically on each other’s doorstep, and there are other obvious similar partnerships that might be geographically attractive: Gloucester and Hartpury, Leicester/Northampton/ Wasps and Coventry/Bedford/Nottingham, Exeter and Cornish Pirates, Saracens and Ampthill, and so on. Whether any of these are attractive to the clubs concerned – there are informal links between some of them already – is another matter, but the Championship problem needs solving, and this might be one way of tackling it.
Last week saw the semi-finals of the Premiership Rugby Cup, a competition desperately in need of a revamp. Played on the Tuesday and Wednesday between two Premiership weekends, that’s a clue as to how it ought to be treated: as a development competition. The problem is that while that might be the intent, it isn’t actually set out anywhere in the rules.
One of the big problems clubs currently face is that many of the Academy and squad players simply don’t play enough rugby. Young players train with the first team, fight to win the shirt, carry the tackle bags, but play a lot less rugby than if they were amateurs, and that can’t be right.
In the early rounds of the Prem Cup the concept of a development competition broadly works, but when it gets to the semifinal then the lure of winning a trophy sometimes takes over, and it leads to what we saw during the week. A glance at the teams gave a pretty clear clue as to how the games would go: London Irish and Worcester went strong, the latter even including a Lion in Duhan van der Merwe, while Leicester and Gloucester stuck firmly to the development idea.
There is nothing wrong with what Irish and Worcester did, but perhaps there should be. The problem is that at this stage of the season it’s always likely that the games will involve clubs who can’t get much out of the season except this minor trophy, so they’re going to be tempted to go against the spirit of the competition: Irish’s playoff hopes are pretty well gone, and if there was relegation Worcester would once again be in trouble.
What is most annoying is that this is so easy to fix. A simple set of rules determining how players are qualified to play in the Premiership Cup would take five minutes to write.
“It makes sense for second-tier clubs to be feeder clubs for top level”