Peter Jackson: It wasn’t just the money that lured Jamie away

Once this column revealed the sheer scale of the offer from Racing Metro a fortnight ago, it was just a matter of time before Jamie Roberts confirmed his departure.
As it turned out, it took him 11 days to come clean, his hand forced by the Cardiff Blues‘ admission that they had been flogging a dead horse in their efforts to keep him. Roberts has applied for his exit visa secure in the knowledge that his prospective new employers are promising to pay him 420,000 euros-a-year – £350,000-a-year at current exchange rates, net of tax.
Half-hearted Welsh warnings about the possible consequences of missing future Polish training camps were hardly going to stampede Roberts into a U-turn. If he justifies the money by bringing his A-game to wherever he plays in the Top 14, he can miss as many training camps as he likes and Wales will still pick him.
As soon as rugby became a business, the old ethos of club loyalty meant nothing. As a professional sportsman, Roberts is no different than Fernando Torres, although one could speculate about the Welshman wreaking rather more in the way of penalty box havoc.
He is perfectly entitled to make the most of it while he can, especially in a sport where the danger of a career-ending injury looms larger than in football.
Every fair-minded Welsh fan will wish him well. The Blues cannot be accused of not putting up a fight which may explain why chairman Peter Thomas sounded more than a touch miffed that Roberts had turned down their counter-offer, reputedly around £300,000-a-year.
The Blues can point to some disturbing facts. Over the last two-and-a-bit seasons since September, 2010, Roberts has started ten matches for his club and 20 Tests for Wales – another example of the capital region suffering from competition with the national team.
Another factor will have influenced Roberts’ decision.
It cannot have helped that he has been obliged to spend far too much time in recent Blues matches lining up behind his own posts waiting for the forlorn chore of trying to charge down the conversion of an opposition try.
The Blues conceded seven of them at home to Ulster in late September and nine to Leinster in Dublin one month later.
Grand Slams, World Cup semi-finals and Lions tours are very grand but the best players also want to be in the hunt for the best club trophies. Dr Roberts will no doubt have made his own prognosis about the Blues being a serious contender for the European Cup and taken that into consideration.
As he said in his carefully-worded statement: “I am absolutely certain that this is the correct time for me to enter a new stage in my career. My intention is to emerge from the experience of playing for a new team as a better rugby player and to broaden my personal horizons in a new environment.”
That sounds to me like a euphemistic way of saying that he wants to join a club (Racing) with serious ambitions. In that respect it could be argued that the festering relationship between the WRU and their regions has contributed, in this case, to one of the best players in Britain choosing to arm himself with an exit visa.
The mutual mistrust between the Union and the regions who produce their Grand Slam players raises the grim spectre of Wales ending up like Argentina with the majority of their Test team employed in France.
Already questions are being asked as to whether Leigh Halfpenny will be the next to go.
After talking about a joint-venture with the WRU to keep Roberts, the Blues have now rounded on the Union. “If we want to keep Jamie Roberts and other international players, the governing body has to intervene,” Thomas said. “They have to take far more responsibility.’
By that he means coughing up money. The WRU is right to resist when the alternative is to make themselves hostage to every inflated French offer for a Welsh player.