Suggested:
Gloucester, Leicester, Bath, Harlequins, Sale, Northampton, London
Irish and Wasps – in short the heart of English club rugby – could all
be scrapped by 2009 if an extraordinary plan to introduce a 10-team
franchise into the English game is enacted by the Rugby Football Union.
That is roughly what they’ve done in Ireland, Wales and Scotland I know, but it really just doesn’t sound like all that sensible an idea. Given the near fanatic local support why dismantle the structure?
In
Kind of obvious given the club/country power struggle going on in English rugby, remove the clubs support/power base. Or it might just be the RFU trying to beat the WRU to the title of “Committee that couldn’t run a piss up in a brewery”.
They tried this one in rugby league a while back (I seem to remember that the idea of merging Castleford with Featherstone to form a “Calder” side was considered particularly asinine). It didn’t take off.
Step two will be when they decide that the Newcastle club can’t be relegated, in the same way in which London can’t in Superleague (every time the London franchise starts to fail, they mess around with the league structure, usually with the effect of screwing some poor bunch of Yorkshire battlers that Alex Harrowell cares about.
As if on cue…
This is a really bad idea and we’ve had a world of shit because of it. Essentially every time you merge two clubs you lose half the support. There’s also a whole new world of really awful rent-seeking politricks involved.
Take the Hull/Gateshead merger – Hull, grand traditional big club with good contacts, finish bottom of the league. But that year, SLE was putting up a £1m slug for any clubs that merged, in an effort to get the merger drive off the ground. Hull’s backers “merged” the club with Gateshead, until then one of the most successful expansion teams, cashed the £1m cheque, flogged Gateshead’s assets except for some rather good players, which they kept…and then, they announced they were now using Gateshead’s “franchise”, and Gateshead had finished 6th, so they couldn’t be relegated.
Trebles all round! And forget the money the RFL spent over 10 years of development in Newcastle..
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