Rams chief executive Gary Reynolds believes his club have been harshly treated by the RFU for a minor administrative error that cost them £8,500 and five match points.
Rams' National One promotion hopes were effectively ended last week when the sanction was imposed following a year-long disciplinary battle, which began when a club official inadvertently ticked the wrong box relating to payments to players during the 2018/19 season.
Although the RFU's investigations concluded that Rams had neither been deliberately inaccurate nor dishonest and payments made to Rams RFC players that season were well below the £157,500 payment threshold for clubs in National Two South – Rams were in level four at the time – the governing body felt that they had not taken proper responsibility for the procedures required for signing and submitting the form and that they had been careless.
Payments towards travel and referee costs for the current campaign have therefore been withheld and the club has been docked 20 points, 15 of which are suspended for two years.
Reynolds told The Rugby Paper: “Without doubt, we breached Regulation 7. We ticked the wrong box on our declaration and our committee then signed the form in the bar, which was not a ‘formal meeting' in the view of the RFU. Technically, they're right – I accept that.
“However, what I would say is that if you compare what Yorkshire Carnegie did with what we did, we, a community club with a positive balance sheet that makes its cashflow work, pay our players properly and don't default our creditors, lose £8,500 and get docked five points, whereas Yorkshire got another £500,000-plus from the RFU and were not docked any points at all.
“When you look at it like that, something's badly wrong here. That's the issue that irks our members and is why we fought the charge so hard. The punishment given to us does not seem proportionate set against what the RFU allowed to slip through last summer.”
Reynolds added: “It's still been a great season for us after winning promotion last year, but through our error we feel we've let the players down. They fought so hard for those points and we're gutted to lose them, but the RFU has decided to make an example of us.”
NEALE HARVEY
