IN The Rugby Paper last Sunday, a picture alongside the National One Dream Team shows how much winning promotion means to the Cambridge players. They were celebrating the fact that their club will be playing in the Championship next season.
Yet their club’s ambitions can extend no further than that, thanks to the scandalous Premiership ring fence.
Promotion and relegation throughout is an essential ingredient of any healthy structure in a team sport, especially one with no meaningful domestic representative stage.
The RFU surely owes it to the rest of English rugby to explain...