Chasing The Dollar

Richard Bath Is An Award-winning Writer Based In The UK.

MONEY MAKES the world go round, and if this wasn’t true of rugby before the game went professional in 1995, it certainly is now.

While the rugby public in Europe have been absorbed by a Six Nations Championship in which Wales have been going for a third Grand Slam under Warren Gatland, the rugby headlines have more often been about cash than crashballs.

Almost no nation in the tournament was left unaffected by off-field considerations. As England and Wales battled it out for the title, for example, multiple rammies about finances meant that the tectonic plates were shifting under the feet of the top players from both unions. In Wales, Project Reset, a plan by the cashstrapped Welsh Rugby Union to financially restructure their four Pro14 clubs through a merger between local rivals Ospreys and Scarlets, with a new club being set up in North Wales, were unveiled in the middle of the tournament. The plans completely bemused players from the two clubs, who had absolutely no prior warning, and no opportunity to ask questions before reading about the plans in the papers.

And, as if things couldn’t get more shambolic, a plan described as “absolute lunacy” by Kiwi David Moffett, a former head of the WRU, was promptly denounced by Ospreys chairman Mike James, supposedly a prime mover in suggesting the merger, which effectively killed off Project Reset.

But that was not before, on the eve of their Six Nations game against Scotland at Murrayfield, we had the bizarre spectacle of Wales players being quizzed by journalists about their contract situation and the state of Welsh rugby politics before moving onto the mundane matter of the next day’s game.

Nor was this about one or two players – 19 of the 23-man Wales squad to face Scotland are employed by Ospreys or Scarlets and therefore faced relocation, redundancy or exile.