BEN Jaycock described last week how Stourbridge RFC is being used as a means to prevent Worcester being demoted to the base of the league pyramid.
Stourbridge and its players are being used as fall guys in Worcester's clever manoeuvres after that club's demise.
Jaycock writes that Worcester will ‘rebrand' next season as ‘Sixways Rugby', and will merge with Stourbridge in National Two West. He adds that Jim O'Toole, the CEO of the consortium which took over Worcester, does not want his new club to go the bottom of the league pyramid. (No surprise there!) No club would want the sort of punishment meted out to Richmond and London Scottish a generation ago; those two famous old clubs have never properly recovered.
O'Toole says the aim is for his re-branded club to reach the Championship within three years, with the eventual aim of getting back into the Premiership. Yet neither Worcester nor any other Premiership club objected to the new ring fence. Expecting to be promoted back into the Premiership now that they are outside that league is the height of hypocrisy.
Jaycock says Stour- bridge RFC also confir med in a letter to its members that the aim was to push for the Championship and beyond. He also writes that, not surprisingly, the family of the late Cecil Duckworth ‘are devastated to lear n of the re-branding', and believe that ‘the new owners are trying to destroy the legacy that Cecil and so many others built'.
Does the Rugby Football Union have a view on this unholy mess?
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Meanwhile, the current Championship leaders Ealing have been told they do not meet the criteria for entry to the Premiership, while the only other club to meet those criteria, Doncaster, are unlikely to finish top. Those criteria include a minimum ground capacity of 10,001; or planning consent to develop the ground to reach that figure, with a current minimum of 5,000.
Yet a look at the crowd figures for Premiership clubs in January shows that a minimum capacity of over 10,000 for promotion to the Premiership is absurd.
January 7
Newcastle Falcons v Leicester Tigers, 6,500
Exeter Chiefs v Northampton Saints, 8,215
January 14
Saracens v Lyon, 8,436
January 28
Sale Sharks v Bath, 6,750
If football's Premier League was ring fenced, never again could famous old clubs such as Burnley, Sheffield United, Middlesbrough, Sunderland, Blackbur n Rovers, West Bromwich Albion, Norwich City, Preston
North End, Queens Park Rangers, Bir mingham City, Stoke City, Cardiff City, Huddersfield Town, Blackpool, Sheffield Wednesday, Ipswich Town, Bolton Wanderers, Derby County, Portsmouth and Charlton Athletic hope to regain their status in the top flight.
Yet the RFU has seen fit to ring fence English rugby's Premiership, so that clubs with equally long and fine traditions as Sunderland and company now have no hope of regaining their for mer status; think of Coventry, Nottingham, Moseley, Richmond, London Scottish, Bedford and Rosslyn Park.
