Almost everyone in English club rugby is agreed on one thing. It cannot go on like this. The system, if that is the right word for the teetering pile of Jenga bricks supporting a cash-strapped 10-team Premiership, is broken and a scheduled eight-year agreement between the Rugby Football Union and the leading club owners is seen as the much-needed long-term answer.
Which is fine – except for one fundamental detail. It does little, as things stand, for anybody else. Talk to people in the second-tier Championship and there is frustration, defiance and gallows humour in roughly equal parts after years of dwindling funds and central support. As Mark Lavery, director of rugby of second-placed Ampthill, puts it: “We’ve taken all the money out of the foundations, put it into the roof and now we’re wondering why the foundations are shaking.”
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