Loose Pass: Where the rebel league’s ‘argument’ falls flat and the ‘farcical’ British & Irish Lions situation

This week we will mostly be concerning ourselves with the breakaway R360 proposal and the ill-conceived Lions warm-up game…

R360’s pitch is a poor playing surface

In a week when Europe is set to enjoy one classic Final, another which has the potential to be a classic, in which Super Rugby has conjured up two fascinating semi-finals and France’s Top 14 two equally intriguing quarter-finals, following a weekend in which second division teams packed out one of France’s most iconic venues and served up a thrilling finale, it seems faintly ludicrous to suggest that rugby is doing so badly that the whole thing needs ripping up or a new level of competition.

But that is, essentially, the thrust of the R360 breakaway proposal, figure-headed by Mike Tindall and Stuart Hooper (formerly of Bath), backed up by a leading player agent and a bloke who spent a year helping LIV golf get itself up and running.

Not all of it is tosh. The line in the R360 pitch about clubs around the world ‘feeling the strain’ ought to resonate in places such as Worcester and Jersey, for example. Yet the proposal, full of ‘weeks of live events before matches’ in places as far-flung as Sao Paolo, doesn’t exactly have the ring of something that won’t cost much. There is a general dislocation throughout the pitch between the proposed ideas and the current financial reality within the game.

So where would this money come from? Investors, of course, those same investors who gave us the IPL and LIV golf and, to a lesser extent, the new re-vamped Formula One and helped the Premier League become what it currently is. And, of course, the fans. Let’s not forget the fans. Currently, we fans apparently do not pay enough for tickets, nor do we splurge enough on pints and pies even when we do have enough for tickets – and even when we do that, we’re not getting hammered enough to max out our cards further on the merch.

The above laments about fans come from a conversation Tindall had on the ‘Good, the Bad and the Rugby’ podcast last year with another LIV executive, Mark Foster (also a former team-mate of Tindall’s at Gloucester). Good points are made by both that the constant tinkering and tweaking of the current rugby competition landscape are making the whole thing a bit of a mess, but when, in times of huge global insecurity both financially and physically, the solution to the mess is to encourage fans to spend relative fortunes on following something they have zero cultural connection with, the argument falls down completely.

England great rips apart Mike Tindall’s radical idea as World Cup winner accused of ‘cash grab’

And never disregard the LIV influence in this either. Lest we forget, the LIV breakaway, funded by a petrochemical state intent on sportswashing its image, drove a huge rift through the middle of the sport and thoroughly devalued – in spectator terms – what made it good in the first place. Think about what might happen if the R360 players ended up in an R360 v country scenario where investors are not in the mood for letting their assets get injured on national duty. The IPL is fuelled by the biggest single-sport national market in the world. LIV by a state with resources. Formula One by a vast number of global hobbyists across all territories and with no rival domestic competition. Rugby has none of those unique advantages.

In the light of many of those reasons, it’s tough to actually see where the necessary money would come from, or on what basis. One TV executive called the proposals this week ‘delusional’ which is perhaps a bit strong, but perhaps also not.

But what it has done is present a point of relativity to those – this column included – who are tired of the constant tweaks and twists to competition formats and the never-ending jumble of interspersed play-offs and tournaments through the season. It’s a slog, but this Finals month promises to deliver.

It’s not great, the way it is at the moment. It could also be a whole lot worse.

The Lions who didn’t tour?

And while the Finals weeks look to be sure-fire crackers, the pressure on Lions tours from what’s fondly known in PR towers as ‘fixture creep’ has cranked up to a faintly comical extent.

17 of the initial 38-man squad are unavailable because of club commitments or injury, with front-row problems in particular meaning we could be left with the farcical situation of one or two players playing for the Lions against Argentina after being called up to fill the holes pre-tour, but not actually going on the tour itself.

This isn’t craziness to the level of Warren Gatland’s now-infamous ‘Geography six’ back in New Zealand in 2017, but it isn’t far from it. There are legitimate scenarios in which Asher Opoku-Fordjour and Jamie George both make the squad and tour in the end, but it all begs the question: why even schedule this game for which so many of the squad could have foreseeably been unavailable?

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