Merging of giants is the only option to lift Welsh
When the organisers finalise their 24 qualifiers for next season’s Champions Cup, they will make room for one from Wales who has no right to be there on merit.
A country that has won more Six Nations titles over the last 17 years than any other, now finds itself reduced to depending on the equivalent of a state hand-out for access to Europe’s premier club competition.
All but one of the 24 will have earned their place as reward for finishing in the top eight of their League, be it the English Premiership, the French Top 14 or the largely celtic United Rugby Championship. The Welsh teams, all four of them, failed to meet that criteria and yet one will be given special dispensation to limp on board.
Cardiff and the Dragons having long fallen by the wayside, Scarlets or Ospreys will claim the token place as the solitary Welsh representative depending on the outcome of their remaining fixtures. A more feeble shoot-out would be hard to imagine.
Had the qualifying cast been picked on results, the Champions Cup next season would go ahead without Wales. Instead of being consigned to oblivion, they will be saved by a compassionate rule allowing the highest-ranked of the Welsh quartet to go through by default.
For that purpose, the United Rugby Championship is divided into four shields of four – Irish, South African, Welsh, Scottish-Italian, hence the disqualification of Benetton Treviso and Zebre for finishing behind Glasgow and Edinburgh.
Both Scottish clubs will finish in the top eight and yet whoever loses their end-of-season collision at Murrayfield will be sacrificed to make room for a team finishing beneath them. The tournament, according to its grandiose title, is supposed to be one for champions not lame ducks.
It’s not as if a case can be made for Welsh teams enhancing the event in recent years. This time last year three of their contenders – Cardiff, Ospreys, Scarlets – qualified via their league position and duly failed to justify their phoney Champions Cup status.
They couldn’t win a single match between them although it must be said that Cardiff, hit by the nightmarish scenario of their first-team squad being marooned in South Africa due to Covid regulations, won countless admirers for the fearless manner in which their European novices gave Toulouse a run for their money.
In 12 matches since then, Cardiff have lost ten before Friday night’s sixtry romp against Zebre. Dragons have won one of their last 16, conceding more than 50 points on three occasions.
Scarlets would have secured the back-door access to the Champions Cup had they not conceded a half century of their own in Swansea last week. Ospreys’ resounding victory sends them to Rodney Parade today knowing that a maximum-point win over the Dragons and another at home to the Bulls on May 20 will take them through instead.
Their run-in will be made to the raucous background of a depressingly familiar narrative over the future of the four regions. A report commissioned by the Welsh Rugby Union makes a series of recommendations including the highly emotive one of
reducing their fully professional teams from four to three, thereby slashing the playing pool by 25 per cent to 135.
There is nothing new in an idea which has cropped up almost ad nauseum as an extreme answer to the perennial problem of an underfunded Welsh quartet increasingly unable to compete with their English and French counterparts.
The regional teams have also suffered from a growing disconnect with
the fans, an unhealthy number of whom pay to support the national team and nobody else. The WRU’s shortsighted refusal to accept the RFU’s offer of six teams in the top two tiers of the English system left them fumbling around for an alternative solution.
Some years later, in 2003, the Union’s then chief executive David Moffett came up with the idea of five regional teams. Two of them, Celtic Warriors and Ospreys, were the creation of shotgun marriages between leading clubs, Bridgend and Pontypridd merging into the Warriors, Swansea and Neath into birds of prey.
While Moffett had many strengths, an appreciation of Welsh rugby’s tribalism wasn’t one of them. The Warriors lasted all of a season since when there have been recurring sagas over the future of the Dragons and Ospreys, ironically so given their success as triple celtic champions. ■IN the course of confirming his premature retirement last week, Hallam Amos went to the trouble of publicly thanking fans, players and coaches for their support throughout his career.
“It’s been a hell of a journey,’’ he wrote on social media. “Rugby is a brutal sport and I’ve definitely had my fair share of injury, from four shoulder ops, knee surgery, elbow dislocation to this recent hamstring tear.’’
Rather than take his chance on one more World Cup next year, Amos, 27, has decided to devote the rest of his working life to his medical career.
He leaves with a record few players can match, scoring Test tries against Australia, South Africa and, most recently, New Zealand in the third-place World Cup decider at the last World Cup.
“The tournament is supposed to be one for champions, not lame ducks”
It has been all too painfully clear that the game cannot afford four fullyprofessional clubs across the narrow rugby belt running from west-east from Llanelli to Newport.
Despite enough hot air to keep a squadron of Zeppelins airborne, proposals for a new region in North Wales have not taken off and never will given the shortage of people in a region more interested in the big football beasts over the English border.
The Professional Game Board will ultimately decide whether the Union can afford to go on running the Dragons and whether two teams barely ten miles apart, Ospreys and Scarlets, can survive as separate entities.
Doing nothing and stumbling on has not been an option for far too long. One look at Wales’ almost skeletal state in the Champions Cup tells them everything they already know.