By Nick Cain - Read his expert opinion every week
We are coming to the franchise crunch. Finally, after five years of funding cuts, obfuscation, impenetrable red tape, empty promises, bureaucratic stasis, and the false flag of promotion-relegation being sacrosanct, the battle for the immediate future of English club rugby is in plain sight.
It started just before the Easter weekend with the wheeling out, furtively at first, of a leaked report of plans to impose a franchise model on the top tier of the English game.
Kite-flying over contentious proposals is an exercise beloved of government...
