RFU turned down Rotherham's bid for right reasons

Yorkshire club's bid to join the elite was incompetent but there is distant hope for lower-League teams

Love them or loathe them – and right now, the good rugby folk of Rotherham fall squarely into the latter category – the grandees of the English Premiership are quicker on their feet than a chemically-enhanced David Campese. Six years ago, they increased the size of the league from 10 teams to 12 to spare Saracens the bother of a season in the Second Division; three years later, they shut out the riff-raff by reducing it from 14 to 12. This time, they have played the status quo card. Some hat-trick, some brass neck.

Out there in National League land, where the Orrells and Wakefields and Coventrys and Worcesters and Exeters and Plymouths are attempting to develop their sporting businesses, they believe the playing field of professional union to be about as level as the south col of Everest. "One up, one down?" scoffed a long-serving Twickenham committee man from the West Country after the blocking of Rotherham's promotion bid by the board of England Rugby Ltd. "It is more a case of 'us up, you down' in my view. We are now only a tiny step away from a ring-fenced Premiership."

Which is precisely what Rob Andrew, the director of rugby at Newcastle, proposed in the spring of 2000 in his RFU-commissioned blueprint for the future of the game, and what bold strategic thinkers such as Mark Evans of Harlequins argue for to this day. Hundreds, probably thousands, of club loyalists from Tyneside to Cornwall see the failure of Rotherham's application as another brick in the Premiership wall – perhaps the most important brick, given that this one has been cemented in place with the full backing of the RFU hierarchy, including that arch-traditionalist of a chairman, Graeme Cattermole.

But ring-fencing is not on the oval-ball agenda – not yet, at least. The most significant statements at Twickenham on Thursday came from Francis Baron, the chief executive of ERL and the RFU, and Peter Wheeler, the chief executive of Leicester and one of the ERL board members who decided that Rotherham were not Premiership material. Taken together, their words guaranteed a free passage of sorts between the Premiership and National League One until the end of the 2008-09 season.

At the end of next season, ERL will review the promotion-relegation issue, and it is highly likely that the board will scrap one up, one down in favour of a play-off system. "Those are the parameters within which we are operating," Wheeler confirmed. "We either stick with automatic promotion, or we go down the play-off road. We will not even consider anything beyond that, because while some of the most successful sporting competitions in the world are ring-fenced – look at America – our culture and tradition is very different." Baron then confirmed that the decision taken in the summer of 2003 will remain in place until the current agreement between the union and the élite clubs expires in 2009.

A play-off between the bottom Premiership club and the National League champions loads the dice in favour of the former: as the top-flight teams professionalise themselves to an ever greater degree with the help of central funding worth £1.8m a season, the rest are left scrummaging against the dead weight of sporting inequality. Even if a National League side bought Twickenham from the RFU and met all the entry criteria twice over – and there are 54 separate clauses in the relevant document, covering everything from limited liability status to the provision of toilet paper – they would have to produce the performance of a lifetime, probably over two legs, to gain admittance.

Yet there is hope for the great unwashed, albeit distant hope. Some senior figures believe that by 2009, the Premiership will be a 16-team tournament, split into conferences – a system that would establish the end-of-season play-offs as an essential part of the whole, rather than an ugly carbuncle on the backside of the campaign, as it is now. They believe Orrell, driven forward by untold millions from the pocket of the Wigan rugby league owner Dave Whelan, will come up to scratch, and they expect Exeter or Plymouth to establish a much-needed stronghold in the far south-west. They anticipate progress in the Midlands too – Worcester and Coventry have designs on a seat at the top table.

"This is a business, and we want to grow the business," said Wheeler. "Despite what people think, we want more Premiership-standard clubs to emerge. The more the merrier, basically. Anything more than a 12-team league would necessitate us going to conferences – the physical nature of rugby means there is a very definite limit to the number of fixtures you can fulfil – but if we ever had 18 or 20 teams of top-flight calibre in this country, it would say a hell of a lot about the strength of our game.

"Next year's National League One will be more competitive than it was this year, as will the Premiership. This says to me that a growing number of teams outside the élite are genuinely serious about seeking Premiership status, that they are attracting the necessary backing and putting in place the right infrastructure in order to progress. When people look closely at our approach to the Rotherham issue, I don't think they will accuse of cynicism. We followed a very clear process and made our decision for the right reasons."

Rotherham's supporters, not to mention tirelessly committed employees like the chief executive Jim Kilfoyle and the player-coach Mike Schmid, are unlikely to accept Wheeler's words at face value, but there is no doubt that the Yorkshire club's promotion bid was hopelessly incompetent, bordering on the spurious. Football, the game of the people, would not have countenanced such an application; neither would cricket, or rugby league, or any other professional team sport. Had Worcester, owners of an excellent facility at Sixways, finished the season as National League champions, Wheeler and company would have struggled to dispute their credentials. Rotherham, by contrast, were a pushover.

The 2002-03 Premiership will be a stronger, more attractive competition for Rotherham's absence – an unpalatable fact, but a fact none the less. Yet their candidacy, however flawed, served a purpose. Bath, Harlequins and Saracens now know what it is to fear for their professional futures, and will sharpen up their acts accordingly. If there is any complacency among the élite in next season's tournament, it will not be found at the Recreation Ground, the Stoop Memorial Ground or Vicarage Road.