RFU has utterly failed to bring the game together

HERE’S wishing The Rugby Paper’s loyal readers, and fans of the game everywhere, a happy and healthy New Year!

- NICK CAIN

It would also be a real boon to say, as we enter 2024, that everything is rosy in the rugby union garden but, given the current state of the game at the moment in England, and elsewhere, this column would be guilty of flying a false flag.

The biggest issue facing the game in England is whether the RFU is any longer fit for purpose as its governing body. The protracted Twickenham administration’s love-in with Eddie Jones, typified by the podcast where Conor O’Shea, the performance director charged with providing an objective assessment of Jones £750k p.a. role as part-time head coach, was his cheerleading co-host, is the tip of the iceberg.

The desperately poor second stage of the Australian’s tenure post-2019 went unchecked until, less than a year before the 2023 World Cup, he was belatedly sacked. Even then the RFU chief executive, Bill Sweeney, allowed Jones to jump ship immediately to become Australia head coach, despite England being in the same half of the World Cup draw. Fortunately for Sweeney and O’Shea, the Wallaby pool stage disaster that followed meant that the inside knowledge Jones had on England was not deployed against them. However, due to an RFU culture of almost total non-accountability, both Sweeney and O’Shea have sailed on – and now they have steered the RFU ship into the huge mass of the iceberg beneath the waterline.

Their desire to recast the professional end of the English game into American-style franchise leagues, in a limp imitation of the NFL, is in the process of doing such damage that their ship is listing badly.

The Sweeney and O’Shea strategy has seen the entire weight of the RFU, in terms of both finance and policy, thrown behind the Premiership cartel of 10 clubs through their hugely divisive Professional Game Partnership (PGP).