It is time rugby went nuclear on the central issue
When rugby union turned professional a quarter of a century ago there were optimists within its ranks who saw the English club game as a potential cash cow.
Two Premiership sides down, seven weeks into the new season and that theory has been exposed as a load of bull. The numbers never added up from the start but the hope was the growth of professional club rugby union the visionaries foresaw would mean that they would eventually.
That has not proved to be the case. While the club game has grown, the debts have grown faster.
The reckoning has been a painful one for the sport as a whole and horrible on a personal level for the 167 members of theWasps workforce who followed those at Worcester down to the Job Centre this week.
Jack Willis, the England back-row, spoke of his total devastation and said he would never get over its loss.
They were the words of the bereaved.
Wasps, twice European champions and six-times champions of England, wiped from the map? It is scarcely credible. It is abundantly clear drastic changes are needed or others could go the same way.
London Irish’s owner Mick Crossan is prepared to give his club away for neils squires main nothing to get it off his hands.
Without the generosity of Semore Kurdi, Newcastle Falcons would have 550 disappeared a long time ago. Those who saw club rugby union as another football in waiting were misguided all along. Club football operates in its own financial universe.
Rugby union has always been much closer to the traditional English cricket system.
The corrections English rugby needs to make should reflect the fact that its appeal is essentially the international game. The clubs, like cricket’s counties, will always have a diehard fanbase but the big money and the eyeballs are attracted to the representative tier. It is high time English rugby followed English cricket, with central contracts.
When Willis joins up with the England squad on Monday for a training camp, clubless, the RFU should offer him one. Bill Sweeney, left, the RFU chief executive, referred to central contracts as the nuclear option this week and they are divisive. Clubs have always been opposed, but recent events should have taken them past the point of stubbornness and pride. They are paying salaries they cannot afford for their stars and central contracts offer a way of offloading those wages. It is not a panacea. Yorkshire cricket fans weren’t delighted his ECB contract meant Joe Root was playing golf in the Dunhill Links during the County Championship match that saw them relegated last season.
Central contracting would restrict the Premiership sides’ access to their big-name players, but the changes being talked about in the size of a league already contracting will almost certainly see fewer club matches anyway.
The status quo is not an option. Something has to give.
Central contracting makes sense for club and country.
●INTERNATION rivalry becomes inter-family rivalry at the Rugby League Wheelchair World Cup in which England’s Declan Roberts will face Ireland’s Phil Roberts. Phil is his dad.