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Your support makes all the difference.Rugby Union
STEVE BALE
Every bit as intransigent as the Rugby Football Union, England's major clubs are preparing to make the fateful decision to secede from their governing body. Relationships have broken down so completely that it would be no surprise if today's emergency board meeting in the City of London of their umbrella grouping, English Professional Clubs, came to this momentous conclusion.
The only hope then would be for the RFU president, Bill Bishop, notably absent from Tuesday's watershed Twickenham press briefing, to step in as a last-ditch mediator during the 24 days that would remain until the end of the season and EPRUC's departure became official.
Bishop, considerably more conciliatory than Cliff Brittle, the RFU executive chairman who has been leading the union's negotiating team, does not care to be remembered as the president under whose stewardship English rugby had a second great schism to follow that of rugby league 101 years ago.
On Tuesday the RFU announced its willingness to negotiate on a number of subsidiary matters but not the substantive ones concerning the administration of the professional club game, which begins with the end of the RFU moratorium on 6 May, and its financial aspects.
The clubs want - perhaps demand would be a better word - autonomous control of both but the RFU has declared them to be non-negotiable and is in effect challenging EPRUC, which represents the 20 clubs who make up the present First and Second Divisions, to do its worst. This is now likely. "People are incensed," Donald Kerr of Harlequins, EPRUC's chief executive, said yesterday.
It is not all gloom for the union, however. Brittle is trying to drive a wedge between the First Division clubs, who together hold a 76 per cent stake in EPRUC, and the Second Division, and it is by no means certain that all the clubs involved, including some in the First Division, will readily agree to the imminent schism.
Yesterday the RFU received support from Richmond, who already know they will be among the four clubs promoted from the Third Division - and so admitted to EPRUC. "As a founding club, Richmond supports the RFU in its role as controller of the game in England," Symon Elliott, the chief executive, said.
Since Tony Hallett, the RFU secretary, is a former Richmond captain and chairman, it would have been peculiar had Elliott said otherwise, but his remarks were of special interest as Richmond are following the professional path as aggressively as anyone after the injection of pounds 2.5m from a businessman. Yesterday they announced the signing of Adrian Davies and Andy Moore, the Cardiff half-backs.
Hallett is still trying to be optimistic. "There will be a bust-up but I don't believe it will become a breakaway," he said yesterday. However, the clubs have said all along - in direct contradiction of the RFU's insistence that broadcasters would deal only with Twickenham - that they have television and sponsorship deals in place to underwrite their own rebel competitions.
Meanwhile the RFU's insistence that divisional rugby continue as an essential part of producing a successful England team - but thereby removing club rugby from the programme for a financially critical period in autumn - is another apparently irreconcilable cause of division.
"Having played in divisional games and captained the South-West to a divisional championship, I know that divisional rugby has been a failure," John Hall, Bath's rugby director, said after a meeting of the club's management board. "Top-flight rugby is the answer, not divisions."
Gloucester defeat Bath,
Richmond signings, page 27
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