Loose Pass: Death by a thousand cuts

David Skippers

This week we will mostly be concerning ourselves with painful cuts and corrective surgery as rugby union reaches a tipping point…

‘Death by a thousand cuts’ is often the chilling idiom used to describe a slow and painful disassembly of a large organisation, but there are absolutely times when it has felt like rugby is going through that process recently.

Pay cuts for players across the board, no fans, tournaments, referees, administrators, training camps and now entire national teams – in this case England’s and Wales’ Sevens teams – have all felt the sharp edges of the knives wielded by their masters the past couple of weeks.

An ugly time, and made all the more ugly by the refusal of many of those masters to make cuts to their own accounts. That JP Doyle, one of England’s better match officials, should be offloaded while the aged windbags on the RFU council continue to lap up the free sandwiches beggars belief.

Games from the new season threaten now to fall foul of the second wave’s onset. Several warm-up matches in France this weekend past were called off as cases there continue to climb ahead of the new Top 14 season. As already iterated last week in this column, it’s hard to see any way the final stages of last season’s European Cup, cross-border travel and all, can go ahead.

Piece by piece, the mosaic that was rugby’s bigger picture is having its tiles chipped away. What lies underneath may look good aesthetically – Super Rugby and the Premiership have been pretty good, surprisingly so in the latter’s case – but, the longer these cuts go on, rugby’s new mosaic will not have the details that made the sport something everyone could look at. That should be a worry to everyone.

Yet still there is intransigence over better synergy. A global calendar is unlikely now until 2022 at the earliest, as the warring factions continue to dig in. Still more is demanded of those players lucky enough to have kept their jobs through this all, even when tournaments clearly suffer for it – as several results in the Premiership showed this weekend.

Dylan Hartley’s forthcoming book is likely to stir up some issues from the players’ perspective, but the interviews he has given to aid its launch have been more succinct still. In one, he called himself and his generation ‘crash-test dummies’ for the professional game and was clearly livid at the lack of compromise from governing bodies when it came to creating a global calendar and a more manageable workload for players.

“There’s always hope but change needs to come from within,” he said to the Guardian. “I fear they’ve had a prime time during Covid to make changes. It feels like the opposite – they’ve crammed more games in… This was such an opportunity to have sat everyone down. But it seems a shambles.”

A shambles is right. When the eight nations tournament was announced for the coming autumn, it was widely believed that Georgia were waiting in the wings should Japan or Fiji not make it. Yet out of nowhere have now come South Africa, if Bernard Laporte is to be believed. Once again ignored; how much does Georgia have to do?

Meanwhile, the nonsensical overlaps between club and country in Europe continue without even the most minute shift in stance from either side. You often wonder if the unions are simply waiting for the clubs to go bankrupt and vice versa. Hartley’s solution – a simple, commercially attractive solution made by a player who has toiled through a decade spent as a crash-test dummy – of a shorter, smaller club season and no overlaps with international season has simply seen both sides of the argument tug harder on the arms of the players caught between them.

Last week was the official 25th anniversary of the game going professional. Even that was a tug-of-war with the players in the middle. They’ve been pushed and pulled every which way ever since. Clubs and countries have placed sticky plaster after sticky plaster over the rifts caused by the current situation. Not one has held fast – and Covid has made the festering wound underneath it much deeper.

When the discussions on the global calendar resume in September, players will be involved. Many share Hartley’s views, not least the one about playing tournaments in blocks and not having to serve multiple masters. Will they be heard?

If it means summer rugby in Europe, so be it. It’s not like rugby ends in April any more like it used to. Most clubs are now ploughing through pre-season friendlies in August – in France, they’ve played a pair of league weekends by the end of August. Switching to a summer calendar would hardly be a major adjustment any more.

The soundbites have rung out time and time again over the past six months that, with so many of the game’s major participating stakeholders facing ruin, there was never a better chance to perform corrective surgery on the cracks and fractures in the game. It’s not happened, and the injuries are there for all to see. The opportunity is still there for now and it cannot be wasted.

Loose Pass compiled by Lawrence Nolan

 

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