Jeff Probyn: In rugby, country should always come before club
Stuart Lancaster has picked an exciting group of young players and has rewarded those who have delivered for him and his coaching team – but I have to say I still find it extraordinary that despite an inordinate amount of money passing from the RFU to the premier clubs, the England team management are being forced to pick their players before the season starts.
The simple truth is that a player’s form and fitness can vary over the course of weeks, so you cannot tell when form will either dip or hit new heights. It must also follow that the opportunity to select on current form gives any team manager the best chance of producing a winning team.
The clubs will say that it is unfair to leave them ‘up in the air’ over the players availability and to take their ‘in form’ players at that vital time of the season, particularly as they own the players contracts.
That is why the current deal (which runs until 2015) was struck for player release but I feel it has placed an unfair financial burden on the Union and the rest of the game, while it has delivered little or no true benefit for the national team.
Just as with the Premiership’s current truculent view of the Heineken Cup, it all comes down to what is good for them not what’s good for the game as a whole and, unfortunately, that comes down to just one thing – money.
The clubs are struggling for financial survival and appear to want to follow a path that has been trodden before by football.
I don’t like comparisons between the two sports because so many are founded on a snobbery that was part of the ‘old school tie rugby‘ of the past that no longer applies to the modern professional game – but in terms of the international teams there are a number of worrying parallels.
In football, the clubs are king with the international side a bit part player in the game’s finances. Yes, a majority of fans will watch the England soccer team but they have a bigger emotional connection with their club side.
That is something that football clubs spent years developing among their fans in the Sixties and Seventies and it remains the fact that generally a football fan supports one particular club and would not watch another team, whereas in rugby fans may have a preferred club but will watch almost any team as supporters of the game in general. In rugby the international game is the king both financially and as a spectator sport, while the clubs are the bit part players. Yes, it is true that the clubs are constantly improving the package they have to offer and are slowly increasing their fan base but it still remains true that on an average weekend the whole of the rugby Premiership does not attract as many spectators as just two premier football sides and that remains a major financial concern for all our clubs.
As a result, they are constantly trying to find new ways of extracting funds from the Union while increasingly trying to create a tribal fan base that will only watch their team as football has done for years.
In football we have one of the best club competitions in the world and yet have failed to produce a World Cup winning national side since 1966.
In rugby, we also have one of the best club competitions in the world and our youth and schools system have produced a succession of successful international teams, but as those young players move into the club academy structure (which is controlled and managed by the Premiership clubs) it seems to me that they are developed into the type of players that fit the club game but may not suit the senior international set-up.
In short we, like football, may produce a number of very fit and skilful individual players that are ideally suited to the game they play each week with their clubs but are less capable of playing a different game outside the comfort zone of the club at the higher international level.
Over the years there has been a chronic waste of talent and resources by those that administer the international game to develop rugby into a real world sport, even the advent of a RWC now moving towards its eighth incarnation in its 32nd year, will still probably be won, as previously, by one of the foundation Unions.
As the biggest and richest Union, the RFU must accept that they, too, have wasted a number of opportunities to grow the sport in this country, which probably necessitated holding back the clubs in an attempt to try and hold on to the amateur ethos that had served the game so well for a hundred years.
With the World Cup here in just three years’ time it would be a shame if the Union were to help finance a better club game but in doing so were to follow football’s example by producing a great team of individual players that can’t win on the international stage!
