Loose Pass: Ealing’s anti-climax, New Zealand players’ heavy workload and more head cases, less action

Lawrence Nolan

This week we will mostly be concerning ourselves with England’s covert shift to franchising, New Zealand’s player welfare plight and head tackle inconsistencies…

Ealing’s anti-climax

A triumphant 60-10 thrashing of Richmond ought to have been cause for the beers to be flowing all week in Ealing, but once again, English rugby has contrived to make access to the Premiership opaque at best, begging the question; quo vadis? Clubs or franchises?

Neither Ealing nor, had Ealing slipped up, Doncaster would have become the Premiership’s 14th team next season, ostensibly because their ground capacities did not measure up to the minimum stipulated 10,000 crowd capacity minimum.

It was noted that neither club had proposed a ground-sharing possibility, yet wherever on the application forms it asks the question: ‘could you share a ground at a larger stadium if required?’, it would be well within the rights of the respondent club to have written two words in the box: ‘London Welsh’.

Doncaster’s appeal against the decision does feature a groundshare option with rugby league team Hull Kingston Rovers, while Ealing continue to promote their planned three-year development of their Vallis Way home. It does not have the planning permission yet, but it does have a healthy air of sustainability about it. And why would Ealing pay the money to go through the processes of getting planning permissions and such before they were sure they would be promoted? Especially since the alternative, a groundshare, would most likely be a loss-maker?

Bizarrely, the minimum stadium capacity criteria for England’s top flight in rugby is twice that of football’s Premiership (5,000), with the RFU apparently looking at that aspect critically. Great, but being as the two best clubs in the Championship meet that threshold, might it not be time to look at it both critically and quickly?

The sense that the shop is closed in all but name unless you are going to bring a bagload of cash continues to prevail, not least while the salary cap cuts continue to bite into Premiership recruitment ahead of next season. It’s understandable to consider that clubs may find the sudden jump in financial commitment tough to handle without a foundation of resources, much harder to understand why a club is not allowed to attempt it when it is demonstrably capable of creating those resources in the medium term.

Or perhaps you just need a sugar daddy to inject a load of cash into a club so it can just buy whatever it needs right now. Sustainable? We’d prefer the planned and merited promotion to the bought one.

Pandemic leaves New Zealand players facing heavy workload

While the rest of the world inches back to normal, New Zealand’s teams are still struggling with the combination of Super Rugby Pacific and pandemic. Moana Pasifika’s serial bad luck over February and March has now been rewarded with a schedule of six games in three weeks however.

Doesn’t there need to be some form of closer look taken at this? That’s a terrifying workload for a professional player at the best of times, never mind the stresses of travel that the pandemic creates.

We’re in the age when the entire sport is under pressure to improve welfare standards, where some of its finest protagonists are struggling to lead normal lives after the age of 40 because of the physical toll the game has taken on their bodies, where the improvement and maintenance of mental health is top of everyone’s priorities. Even announcing the schedule, NZ Rugby’s general manager professional rugby and performance, Chris Lendrum, insisted player welfare was “front of mind”.

But when push comes to shove, that seems not to actually be the case. The only thing we see here is: “the show must go on, or we lose the money.”

More head cases, less action

World Rugby has driven much that is good about research into head injuries in rugby, even if slowly at times and with a measured reluctance to look at liability.

But certainly in most leagues, the guidelines around poor tackle technique are biting, with red cards being flourished and suspensions serving as a warning to those who transgress, while referees are generally quite clear about what is down to poor tackling and what is down to simple rugby actions going a bit awry.

Yet the tackle technique and its enforcement in Super Rugby Pacific continues to be poor. Five red cards this weekend past, none of which could be even vaguely mitigated, point to an outdated attitude to tackle technique, while the downgrading of Tom Banks’ red card by the beaks is nothing beyond extraordinary.

World Rugby has little power to intervene in the administrations of tournaments and unions, but in this case, with a clear medical grounding for intervention on the basis of player safety, we’d very much appreciate a little guidance from the game’s governing body to a tournament and disciplinary seeming remarkably lax about addressing one of the game’s most pressing issues.

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