PAUL REES SAYS IT WAS THE LOCAL RIVALRIES WHICH HELPED BUILD THE GAME IN WALES AND WHICH NEED TO BE REVIVED
The 1920s was arguably the worst decade in the history of Welsh rugby.
In three successive Five Nations campaigns from 1923, the only team they defeated was France, easybeats in those days, a feat they repeated in 1927.
They went through the decade defeating England and Scotland just twice and, excluding France, won just two matches on the road.
They started it well enough, champions in 1922 after sharing the title two years earlier with England and Scotland, but in the following six years won seven matches, five of them against France against whom they lost for the first time in 1928.
Money Issues
Money was at the root of the collapse of a side which had been strong before the Great War, outright champions in five of the first 14 years of the century up to the Great War with five Grand Slams, but the economic downturn after the conflict saw a migration from the country.
Wales as a team was made up largely of men from the heavy industries and they either moved to England for work or turned professional: when Wales played England in a rugby league international in 1926, more than 70 per cent of the side was made up of recent union caps.
The following year, a crowd of 15,000 watched the victory over France at St Helen’s, less than Swansea had been attracting a few years earlier.
Pontypool started the 1921-22 season with only seven players having lost their entire pack to rugby league clubs during the summer.
Rochdale Hornets had 10 Welsh players on their books in 1923 and a number of those who went north were backs, including Jerry Shea, Johnny Ring, Frank Evans and WJ Powell, which contributed to the sterile rugby that deterred spectators and made the regular exclusion of Llanelli’s Albert Jenkins all the harder to fathom.
Before the match with England in Swansea in 1924, the crowd had warmed up with a number of songs.
The most enthusiastic rendition was given to ‘Yes, we have no bananas’ but as spectators poured out of the ground at the end, the final word was changed to ‘three-quarters’.
“Wales started this decade reasonably well – champions in 2021 and close to a Grand Slam”
Selection, which was then decided by a committee of 13 until unrest over poor form saw it reduced to five, became wildly erratic: Wales had a different outside-half in every match against England between 1920 and 1934, capped 35 players in 1924 with only one forward, Maesteg’s Charlie Pugh playing in all four matches, and in that year and the following one they had a different captain in each match.
Wales started this decade reasonably, champions in 2021 and just a couple of minutes away from the Grand Slam in Paris.
They made the quarter-finals of the 2023 World Cup and led Argentina in the final quarter, but since then they have lost 17 successive Tests, the worst run of a tier one nation in the professional era.
They were whitewashed this year and last and in February parted company with Warren Gatland, the head coach who brought sustained success in the 2010s.
The Welsh Rugby Union still has to decide his replacement.
In the 1920s, Wales had a competitive club scene to fall back on, although football enjoyed an upturn in popularity in the 1920s, culminating in Cardiff City’s FA Cup triumph.
Regions
Today it has four regions one of which, Cardiff, was taken over by the Welsh Rugby Union last week after its owners admitted they could not fund the debt-ridden enterprise.
Here was another echo of the 1920s when Cardiff hit financial problems with decreasing spectator numbers making it difficult to maintain the upkeep of the Arms Park.
The Union, at considerable expense, bought a majority control of the company that had been set up in 1923 to control the ground which it agreed to lease to the Cardiff Athletic Club until 2032.
Cardiff were saved, as were Cardiff Rugby last week, but the financial picture for the regions is bleak.
The Dragons, the most unsuccessful of the four on the field, are breaking even, but Cardiff, the Ospreys and the Scarlets all posted losses of more than £2m in their last set of accounts.
The WRU wants the four, make that three given that it now runs Cardiff, to sign up to a new professional rugby agreement, which will determine their funding for the rest of the decade. It set a deadline of last Tuesday evening, which was not met.
Judgement Day
The four were last weekend all involved in what has become billed as Judgement Day.
The Ospreys took on Cardiff at the Principality Stadium before the Dragons faced the Scarlets but the matches were played against a backdrop of financial uncertainty, more a wake than a celebration.
The regions were paid £7.2m a year in 2022, but this season, when for the first time Wales did not have a side in the Champions Cup, it had dropped to £4.5m.
It is set to rise to £6.9m by the end of the decade, but Wales’s model makes it rely on benefactors and there is no queue to invest for no return.
It is why, perhaps, Helford Capital Limited was allowed to complete its takeover of Cardiff Rugby at the beginning of 2024 when it acquired 84.55 per cent of the shares.
The deal had shades of Worcester, a club which went under in 2022 after its owners were unable to continue to bankroll it, leading to questions about how they were allowed to take control.
“Cardiff are fortunate to already boast an exceptional pathway – only Leinster produce more players across the three top leagues in Europe – and we are determined to harness and unleash its full potential,” said Helford after its takeover of Cardiff Rugby.
“We will now embark on an inclusive process to build a long-term strategy to ensure Cardiff is market leader in all areas of the business.”
And there the comparisons with Leinster end. Ireland’s capital side continues to grow while Wales’s lacks capital.
Cardiff
Considering Wales and Cardiff’s rich rugby heritage, it is not so much a sad state of affairs as a scandal.
The former Wales captain Sam Warburton resigned from the Cardiff board after the move into administration.
He says that unless the number of regions is cut to three he cannot see any of them becoming truly competitive and that without extra financial resources “we will never be able to move away from the terrible position we find ourselves in at the moment, with the regions and the national team unable to compete”.
He continued in his column in The Times: “There is huge potential across Wales, but big changes are required.
I still think the regions and the WRU should be fighting for an Anglo-Welsh league.
You need a product that sells, and that undoubtedly would sell, as it is glaringly obvious now that the rugby on offer in Wales is not selling well enough.”
Dropping to three regions would not make it an easier sell. It would reduce what rivalry there is left at the top end of the game in Wales and would be an admission of defeat.
Anglo-Welsh League
As for an Anglo-Welsh league, if there are not discussions being held on the quiet with the English clubs struggling to become sustainable following the loss of Worcester, Wasps and London Irish and supporters in Wales desperate for meaningful league action, how will the game grow in either country?
It is not difficult to appreciate what sells. Take out the derby, and the crowds drawn by the four regions in the Challenge Cup were half, or even less, those generated by Gloucester, Bayonne, Lyon and Vannes and nowhere near Perpignan or Montpellier.
It is a similar tale in the United Rugby Championship where the derbies tend to draw the largest crowds. Cardiff are the best supported, three times recording five-figure attendances this season, two for the Ospreys and the Scarlets. The only other one in Wales was in Llanelli when the Scarlets faced the Ospreys.
Rivalry
The Welsh game was built on local rivalry and it is what mainly sells now so to reduce the regions to three would amount to an act of self-harm, no matter how financially appealing it would look. It would shrink the base further and add up to a false economy.
Getting rid of the Celtic Warriors one year into the regional change served only to disenfranchise the Valleys where supporters were never going to transfer their allegiance to the then Cardiff Blues.
Instead of continuing to cut, Wales should be looking to stimulate growth but the game there is trapped in a web of despair.
The pandemic and its aftermath highlighted, and exacerbated, the financial problems that have blighted much of the professional era.
Not least because the regions, as was the case with clubs in the other parts of Britain, had to take out government loans when their income was slashed because of the lockdowns: and even when restrictions were eased, they were forced to play behind closed doors.
“It’s now 22 years since the regions were set up and they have yet to resonate”
The Department of Culture, Media and Sport loaned £474m to 120 organisations; by the end of last year it had received less than 10 per cent of it back.
Nine borrowers had become insolvent and more than half still had to make any repayments.
A parliamentary committee this month called on the department to assess its long-term options for the loans, including their outright sale, and to “demonstrate a tough approach on behalf of taxpayers to managing those borrowers in trouble”.
Its report warned that future repayment was put at risk by “DCMS’s need to maintain the financial viability of the sectors to which it has given loans”.
There was particular scrutiny of the £124m loaned to the Premiership with three clubs subsequently going under.
The DCMS insisted that the clubs were financially viable when it awarded the loans, which suggests it was the government’s policies during the pandemic that caused them to topple over.
The committee recommended that the loans should not be extended.
One-Dimensional Thinking
Which is typical of the one-dimensional thinking in this country when it comes to sport and government support.
The notion that taxpayers will be best served on a tough approach being taken against clubs – in Wales the loan was given to the WRU to be dispersed among the regions – is mind-numbingly short-sighted.
How were taxpayers served by three clubs going under with the loss of hundreds of jobs, and with them, income tax and national insurance receipts, and the subsequent impact on the local economies?
How will they benefit if more go under with Newcastle urgently seeking new investment?
They have a different approach in France where local authorities invest in sport, recognising the role it plays in physical and mental health, so reducing demands on taxpayers in the long-term.
It is a reason why Top 14 clubs there are able to spend their resources on squads and coaching teams, not having to worry about stadium upkeep.
Did taxpayers in England get a return from only one Premiership club staging a home match in the knock-out stage of the Champions Cup?
The current government bangs on about the need for growth rather than austerity so why should sport be an exception? The period for repaying the loans should be extended.
Covid Debt
In Wales, the WRU will take the Covid debt on if the regions sign the new professional rugby agreement.
It does not have to worry about Cardiff agreeing, but the other three will have questions given that the takeover will cost the governing body some £2m – and it is taking on a loss-making side.
Will the other three receive an equivalent sum? Under the agreement, investors at all four will have to find more than £20m in the next five years to cover anticipated losses. Good luck in finding a buyer for Cardiff.
And so Judgement Day was hardly a celebration, more a peek from behind the curtains into an uncertain future.
Boxing Day used to be derby time in Wales, from Aberavon wrestling with Neath and Maesteg confronting Bridgend to Tredegar grappling with Ebbw Vale and Pontypridd looking to get one over on Cardiff.
There was never very much in the way of seasonal goodwill and it did not matter how Wales were faring. The Welsh club game rotated on its own axis, rivalries simmering through the season and very often boiling over.
If the rest of this decade is not to go the same way as the second half of the 1920s, what happened to Cardiff needs to have a cold-water effect.
It remains one of the biggest names in world rugby, and not just because of the Arms Park.
Llanelli
Llanelli has disappeared as a club with the Scarlets using Llandovery and Carmarthen Quins to develop players.
The Scarlets will always be Llanelli just as the Dragons, which was originally set up by Newport and Ebbw Vale, an arrangement that did not last as long as the drive from one ground to the other, will be Newport.
The Ospreys was for a long while a true partnership between Neath and Swansea, but the region’s new home will be at St Helen’s, Swansea’s old ground.
And it is in the past that the future lies, clubs rich in history, achievement and following. The URC is not a good fit for Wales because it is a tournament run by unions and is subservient to the international game.
It is 22 years since the regions were set up. They have yet to resonate, hardly surprising because when rivals merge something intrinsic is lost. Imagine Celtic and Rangers coming together or Liverpool and Everton.
Wales may be struggling to compete financially but it has an asset few can match. It has been in hibernation and needs to be jolted awake.
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