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#Post#: 602--------------------------------------------------
Ring fencing again!
By: Duncang Date: March 28, 2018, 4:05 am
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Looks like they're going to have another go and it could be as
soon as the 18-19 season:
HTML https://twitter.com/owenslot/status/978530014596599808?s=19
#Post#: 603--------------------------------------------------
Re: Ring fencing again!
By: Malc Date: March 28, 2018, 1:29 pm
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So will they increase teams in championship
#Post#: 635--------------------------------------------------
Re: Ring fencing again!
By: Duncang Date: April 2, 2018, 1:20 pm
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Update in the Guardian:
HTML https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2018/apr/02/champions-cup-rugby-premiership-wrangle?
#Post#: 646--------------------------------------------------
Re: Ring fencing again!
By: Duncang Date: April 4, 2018, 5:51 am
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Bit late but a great article from the Times rugby writer Stephen
Jones
"Like some invasive cancer of the body and spirit, the idea of
ring-fencing the Aviva Premiership recurs. As we reported
yesterday, a powerful cabal inside Premiership Rugby want to
preserve themselves as if pickled in vinegar, forever. If they
do, the hardest rugby league in the world, overnight, would turn
soft as melted butter.
One idea is that as early as the end of next season (and the
timetable alone is a disgrace) the club finishing bottom will
play the champions of the Championship in a two-leg play-off.
And after that, for the foreseeable future, the Premiership 12
will smugly remain, even if, say, they lose all their games for
five consecutive seasons.
The idea offends rugby’s sense of fairness and ethos and
aspiration, and would also afflict the spectacle. It will kill
any sense of climax to the season, it will kill the
Championship, leaving the second flight left with nowhere to go.
Anyone who grasps the rank, rotten selfishness behind the move,
and the refusal of its proponents ever to dare to debate in
public, will find it all distasteful. Will the Rugby Football
Union, meant to be the champion of the whole game, meekly cower
into submission?
The clubs suggest that bank managers will be more keen to loan
them finance if they are guaranteed not to disappear to the
semi-professional ranks, so their fates become predictable. But
at the heart of it is plain selfishness, the smug assumption of
eternity, and cowardice.
Among those who apparently supported this new move when mooted
some time ago, are London Irish — sadly for them and the timing
of their support, they are now stone cold certainties to be
relegated. Whoops. Inconvenient.
But what if this dismal new move had taken place at other times
— say it had happened after the relegation of Northampton or
Harlequins. Those two clubs would now be trundling along in
semi-professional play, well away from the mad crowd of the
professional game.
And say the move had come in a few years ago, then we would have
no Exeter Chiefs. Indeed, when those tired old excuses are
trotted out for ring-fencing, those of us who tend towards a
sport that is fair and open and allows aspiration, can retort
with one word: “Exeter.”
And what of the mighty Chiefs, and all their wonderful
contribution on their ascension to the Premiership? They want to
pull up the drawbridge too. Not big on principle, these clubs.
Bristol, one of the truly great clubs, are on the verge of
promotion. Damn. That gives the cabal a club too many. I am
positive they have discussed turning the Premiership into a
13-team 26-match event. Well, both PR and the RFU pulverise
players to within a millimetre of their careers. What’s another
two games between friends.
Whose example are the frightened 12 following? Have you ever
followed the late-season stages of the other ring-fenced
competitions, Super Rugby and the Pro-14? Have you seen how
interest dissolves, how the crowds diminish markedly; how little
interest there is from the media for late-season games?
The Premiership and the England team management point out that
to take away the spectre of relegation will allow them to blood
hordes of youngsters, playing without pressure. To flaming hell
with that, and back. Professional rugby is all about existing
under pressure, and all about parading your best players for
your paying public. It would not be my decision but if the
Premiership latter stages are packed with youngsters trolling
across professional rugby pitches then I would personally not be
at all minded to go along to report.
And what a horrible betrayal of the warrior traditions of the
Premiership, and the way it fought from lowly beginnings. The
culture of the whole league is to do battle, the average winning
margin is tiny, and in many seasons, the bottom team can beat
the top team. That is one of the wonders of the whole thing,
that is why the Premiership is where it is, that is why the
followers have been gloriously tribal.
And now they want to take away that bite. The fans will loathe
it. If there is no relegation, then true competitive games will
be restricted to the top six or seven and the whole thing will
effectively be reduced to two divisions within a division.
Even the Premiership final will lose its lustre because it will
reveal not the champions of English club rugby, but of a tiny
group of old contemptibles frightened of the outside world. I
have great respect for almost all the benefactors who have given
us a professional game when no one else could, when the RFU had
no idea.
Yet unless they were myopic and supremely optimistic, they came
into rugby not for pure profit, but for love and for the
principles of the sport. Something very sacred is about to be
violated."
#Post#: 647--------------------------------------------------
Re: Ring fencing again!
By: Duncang Date: April 4, 2018, 7:44 am
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Here's a slightly different suggestion which would see an
expanded Premiership:
HTML https://www.rugbypass.com/news/expansion-not-expulsion-way-forward-premiership
All the articles I see on ring fencing, I haven't come across
one that is in favour yet.... which will probably mean the RFU
will accept them???
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