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Premiership pulls up the drawbridge?

Wednesday, March 2, 2022 10:43

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Yesterday’s announcement by the RFU that Doncaster Knights and Ealing Trailfinders have not met the minimum standards criteria for promotion to the Premiership, has been met with understandable criticism.

One of the minimum standards criteria is that a club’s stadium must hold a minimum of 10,001 fans. Ealing’s ground currently holds approximately 5,000, while Doncaster’s has a capacity of around 5,183.

So, both Doncaster and Ealing fall well short, but when you consider that the likes of Newcastle Falcons, Sale Sharks, Worcester Warriors, London Irish, Wasps and even the likes of Exeter and Saracens have attracted crowds under the 10,001 threshold this season, some on a regular basis, it does seem more than a little strange that the RFU are focussing on ground capacity as the minimum criterion on which the decision is being based.

I am not particularly idealistic around this issue. To be honest I don’t know whether either of Doncaster or Ealing deserve to be promoted or not – each of them may well not have the infrastructure to be able to compete in the Premiership (we certainly don’t need to see a London Welsh type situation in which the club bankrupted itself trying to compete with the elite clubs).

People talk about the need to grow the game but, once again, I run the risk of repeating myself insofar as I have long believed that there simply isn’t enough money in the game to fund two fully professional leagues in England.

What I believe is needed is a proper root and branch reform of professional rugby in this country with a clear delineation between 16 or so elite professional clubs – properly funded by the corporate world, TV revenues and paying fans – and the amateur game supported by the RFU.

Instead we have the current fudge, whereby the promotion of ambitious Championship clubs to the Premiership remains theoretically possible, but which in reality sees the drawbridge being pulled up to prevent such promotion by using such an arbitrary and unfair criterion as ground capacity.

Total Flanker – the older I get, the better I was

Source: https://www.totalflanker.co.uk/2022/03/premiership-pulls-up-drawbridge.html

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