Jeff Probyn: Professional game must not take the Blockheads literally

To paraphrase Ian Dury, Sex and Drugs and Rock and Roll is all that rugby needs. Sex is the easy part as the women’s game (the opposite sex) have shown the men what needs to be done if the RFU are truly to get a legacy from next year’s World Cup.
Winning the Women’s World Cup in August has fast-forwarded the women’s game to a level they never dreamed of. Fated with an audience with the Prime Minister at Downing Street, but sadly not yet the Palace, they have taken their game from a curiosity to the ‘real thing’.
Despite the massive rise in interest, it remains a fact that, sadly, there is no way that the women’s game can survive as a professional sport. Even so, 12 players from the winning team have been given central contracts by the RFU to allow them to train full time, a move that is hoped will drive up standards and maintain the team’s position in the world game.
However, even with the exceptional growth of the woman’s game, it is still only a tiny proportion of the game as a whole, with most clubs that do have a women’s section (and that’s not many) fielding a single team.
I am not sure how this will work with the chosen few playing in what is essentially an amateur game at club level as the only full time professionals and how that could impact on the results in their league. The likelihood of a professional women’s club league within 10 years is negligible.
The central contracts are to be given on an annual basis with no guarantee of a long term professional career, so it would be foolish or exceedingly brave for a player to give up her career for full time rugby on that basis. But with the Olympics in 2016 on the horizon, some just might.
Drugs are a reflection on the sad story of Sam Chalmers who is half way through his ban and is using his story to heighten awareness of the dangers young players face as they try everything and anything to get that vital contract.
His tale is a cautionary one. As the son of one of Scotland‘s great fly-halves, Craig Chalmers, and playing for a senior club (Melrose), Sam had a great future mapped out except for just one thing – he wasn’t quite big enough or heavy enough (in his coaches’ opinion) so he took what his mates were taking and was caught.
Despite drug education and awareness programmes, there is still an increasingly worrying number of drugs cases among young players.
The South African Institute for Drug-Free Sport randomly tested a number of school players and found that over a quarter were positive for steroids.
It’s not just South Africa. There has been a case here in England, at Hartpury College near Gloucester, who conduct their own testing regime, of a student testing positive. The temptation for young players to take performance-enhancing drugs is enormous as they struggle to imitate their heroes.
The nature of pro sport where a series of boxes have to be ‘ticked’ for a contract to be offered makes a level of performance-enhancing drug use almost inevitable as young players have that one shot at making the grade before being abandoned to the Championship or below.
Back in the amateur days the desire to play was driven only by personal vanity rather than money, so it would more than likely have been only if a player was close to international selection and found wanting on size that the temptation to take a little something to help would have manifested itself.
We can all remember the odd player who, when on the fringes of the international game, made a sudden dramatic and inexplicable gain in size in an incredibly short space of time, just as some who have made the move abroad seem bigger now than when they played here.
As rugby has changed to a professional game, so has the need for players to be bigger and heavier to fit the professional coach-led game where skill is no longer enough.
Sadly, if the difference between making it or not comes down to taking a pill and a gamble on not being caught, given the limited number of drug tests and relatively light sanctions (two years for Sam), some see it as a gamble worth taking.
Rock and Roll, well the All Blacks agreeing to yesterday’s game in Chicago in front of a 61,500 sell-out crowd is pretty Rock and Roll to me! Add to that the news that the Premiership has had talks about playing games over there and we have a real Rock and Roll fantasy in the making.
The Premiership know the obvious advantages of breaking into the untapped American market, but it could be harder than they think. Unlike South Africa, which is on our time line, making it a simple ‘fly in fly out’ with no jetlag, America is different.
The distances and the time it takes travelling to and across that continent, along with flight fatigue would make it very difficult to fit in games during the season.
Also, the difference in playing standards would make the games uncompetitive unless the talks are just about staging games between Premiership teams in the US, which seems a bit daft as the Premiership struggle to fill stadiums over here.
Why would UK fans travel thousands of miles to watch a game that should be played at home and why should American fans turn up to watch teams they don’t know?
*This article was first published in The Rugby Paper on November 2.