We need return to the County game

In Rugby Paper December 29, Paul Rees refers to Exeter’s Rob Baxter, whose club were bottom of the Premiership after eight successive defeats.

Exeter are the outstanding example of how a club could benefit from an open-ended league structure in which clubs could rise and fall from top to bottom – including the now-ringfenced Premiership.

Nick Cain suggests that French rugby shows how a vibrant, open-ended league structure can provide huge interest – unlike in England, where the fortunes of the ring-fenced Premiership club provoke little interest in areas such as Yorkshire and Cornwall.

In his review of the year, Brendan Gallagher describes the ‘naked greed’ of some of the RFU’s top officers. It seems nothing much has changed since my 1995 book Rugby’s Blazered Buffoons.

In the light of that greed, Paul Rees calls for a ‘reset’, rather than a revolution such as happened in the mid 1990s.

Steve Hill talks to Otley head coach Kyle Dench and asks what could be done to strengthen community rugby in England, and to create adequate pathways for player development.

Dench rightly says that the simple answer – and one which the likes of Ireland and New Zealand have always supported – is to return to a proper domestic representative stage between club and country. Counties now with no hope of having a club in the Premiership – such as Otley’s Yorkshire – now lack those pathways.

Jeff Gage

My New Year hopes for rugby: Sack RFU bosses and bring in the likes of Simon Halliday, Clive Woodward, Jason Leonard and Stuart Barnes to shake things up. Bring back promotion and relegation to and from the Premiership (with no play-offs) and expand Premiership to 12 teams, with one team relegated in the fifirst year and three Championship clubs promoted regardless of ground size; then two up and two down in the following years.

Allow players regardless of where they play – home or abroad – to qualify to play for England. The Six Nations is a make or break for the England coaching staff and many of the players who have been around too long. If they fail, make Pat Lam the new England coach.

Colin Boulton