Something good must come of it
Someone once wrote “It is a truth universally acknowledged …” and in the context of a 21st Century in which the human world becomes ever smaller and more interconnected perhaps nobody should be surprised when greed, self-interest, sailing close to or ‘bending’ the rules in order to gain advancement or success occurs in every walk of life – including sport.
Everyone is at it.
The Rust has long campaigned from a hard-line point of view about the use of performance-enhancing drugs in sport – every sport.
As cycling fans will know, the former Team Sky doctor Richard Freeman – who was unable to testify in public in 2018 because of some unspecified (one hesitates to say “unidentified”) medical condition about a ‘jiffy bag’ package that he had organised that was now under suspicion, and indeed let us not forget that nobody at Team Sky was able to give any information about what it contained either – recently slid back into the spotlight by agreeing to appear at a medical tribunal that started proceedings yesterday, admitting in advance that he had previously “told a lot of lies and [he] couldn’t bring himself to tell the truth, even to his lawyers …”
We all read a month or so ago that, after a four-year investigation by the US Anti-Doping Agency the infamous US athletics coach Alberto Salazar – trainer of Sir Mo Farah amongst others – had been given a four-year ban for doping violations.
He’s appealing, of course, so perhaps that’s not yet the end of the matter.
Yesterday – barely a week after the end of what was generally-agreed to be an excellent Rugby World Cup in Japan, which then prompted a snowstorm of speculation as to how the sport might best capitalise upon the opportunities presented by the positive effect, including in the columns of this organ – rugby union duly returned to something like its version of “business as usual.
I don’t mind admitting that I was as surprised as anyone to learn mid-afternoon yesterday that reigning English Rugby Premiership champions and European Rugby Champions Cup champions Saracens have been docked 35 Premiership points and fined £5.3 million after being found guilty of breaching the Premiership salary cap after a specialist independent arbiter organisation investigated the evidence uncovered by an investigation in the Daily Mail.
[One must be a tad careful here in the sense that the Saracens long-time former owner and head honcho Nigel Wray – a true rugby nut – and the club have already indicated that they are appealing this decision and yesterday’s news may not be the final word on the matter].
Don’t get me wrong. Everyone involved in and/or following rugby union has been “aware” of Saracens’ strange situation.
For a decade there has been both open chat – and indeed scepticism – about how, over so many years, the club had managed to maintain quite such a large playing squad (containing quite so many world superstars of the game, presumably also accompanied by the best, most expensive and demanding, agents) and at the same time stay within the Premiership’s salary cap.
The strong suspicion of most people, of course, was that they hadn’t. It was openly believed by fans and insiders at all other Premiership clubs that Saracens were in breach of the salary cap rules – or at least had stretched the boundaries of them to the absolute limit – nobody was quite sure which. However, they were pretty sure that Saracens were playing by different rules to everyone else – you only had to look at the playing squads of each club to come to that conclusion, or indeed the even-more damning one that Sarries weren’t the only club doing it.
A couple of years ago there were big rumours flying about that the Premiership had done its own investigation and concluded that several clubs had breached the salary cap (deliberately or otherwise) – Saracens was the name that came up in every report and conversation as being one.
Later it was reported that the Premiership had backed down on taking action against the alleged transgressors, largely because one of them – an “unnamed” club [in fact Saracens] – had come out aggressively to tell Premiership Rugby that if any action was taken against them, or any punishment meted out, they would instantly take legal action to defend itself to whatever extent was necessary or available to it.
The other excuse that was given at the time for not proceeding with sanctions against the club (or clubs) that had driven “a coach and four” through the salary cap rules was that it would make rugby fans all over the nation feel “cheated”.
The argument for this ran that they’d just watched a Premiership season – and enjoyed or endured all the ups and downs of fortune of their respective teams – from beginning to end … and it would be a terrible blow (and pity), wouldn’t it, if they were now to be told that in fact what they’d been watching all season was in fact a “rigged” competition, the results of which (already written in the record books) now had to be unpicked and instead decided by rules and regulations, rather than what happened (and was witnessed by everyone) upon the field of play?
And so that particular investigation – and its findings – were quietly and conveniently dropped.
And now we have reached where we have reached. A wonderful Rugby World Cup just ended and – to borrow a phrase from the round ball game – almost an “open goal” in front of the World Rugby authorities in terms of an opportunity to develop the game exponentially, and yet in England Premiership Rugby is now facing a significant crisis of credibility.
The mighty Saracens, multi-winners of domestic and European club competitions – possessed of a cadre of England rugby players described recently as the spine of the nation’s national squad, including its captain – “on the face of it” outed as systematic flouters of the salary cap rules.
This shocking development may run and run for a while yet.
This in a sport in which – at its Premiership club level – the last time I looked had just one club in the black, the remainder all making regular operating losses, some of them (including Saracens) running in total into tens of millions of pounds.
Talk about a sport shooting itself in the foot.