Fiddling while Rome burns (and why not?)
Somewhere around 6.30am this morning Him Indoors will be bringing me my first cup of weekend tea in bed. After that we shall gradually prepare to make our way to the drawing room to watch Sky Sports’ live coverage of the Highlanders taking on the Chiefs in Dunedin in the opening game of Super Rugby Aotearoa, New Zealand’s official return to top flight rugby, commencing an hour later.
Never mind the UK’s tentative steps towards finishing the English Premier League 2019/2020 season behind closed doors starting with great ceremony next week, the new Kiwi rugby competition will kick-off with stadia potentially filled with crowds as per pre-coronavirus normal.
You can do this sort of thing if you live in a country that has declared itself virus-free and a national alert level of just 1, the lowest on its scale.
Back here in RFU-land it seems that a state of drifting chaos continues to reign.
In The Rugby Paper last weekend we learned from journalist Nick Cain that the RFU has warned its staff of further potentially sweeping redundancies and is actively seeking to put in place a £250 million financial rescue plan to deal with the fact that effectively it has no reserves left and is at the limit of its £100 million borrowing facility.
Meanwhile it continues to ‘bob and weave on the ropes’ under sustained pressure from both its ex-CEO Francis Baron (who has been systematically attacking the quality of its financial management for the past three years) and a sizable cohort of disgruntled members of what used to be called “the ‘old farts” brigade at its slavish obsession with international and professional rugby at the expense of the grassroots game in England which is now reduced to a sorely-neglected state.
Elsewhere of course the Premiership is in a whole heap of trouble of its own making.
The whole structure is a can of self-interested worms as was all too starkly exposed by Lord Myners’ uncompromising report into its corporate governance and performance.
His review of a depressingly long list of incidents of single club and/or group corruption, rule-breaking, secret deals and self-interested cover-ups left some fans with the sad impression that the elite rugby they had been watching over the past decade bore little resemblance at all to the honest “level playing field’ competition run with high principles and integrity the Premiership had pretended itself to be.
Typically, once Lord Myners’ Report has been received, whilst the Premiership clubs instantly fell over themselves to accept “in full” its 50-odd recommendations, they “held back” discussion over his Salary Cap proposal(s) and have since announced a much watered-down and gradually introduced version which neatly kicks the need of any of them to address the very-real problems elite club rugby in England faces well down the road even before any post-virus play resumes.
And that’s before they get to work something out with the players, who in many cases only weeks ago were forced to take up to a temporary 25% cut in wages “in view of the coronavirus crisis” and are now facing a Premiership proposal for a permanent adoption of that reduction with an accompanying announcement that the move is now non-negotiable despite the fact that the players’ union is claiming lack of proper consultation and now threatening legal action.
We all know turkeys don’t vote for Christmas but – as a would-be developing global game – rugby union, from its governing body World Rugby downwards at every administrative level and in every country, is facing a large number of complicated problems yet in response is currently doing a very good impression of showing itself capable of achieving little more than repeatedly shooting itself in the collective foot.
Ah well, let’s put all that aside for the moment. At least we’ve got some live rugby to watch today …
