WRW #10: CHAOS REIGNS
Going to be a long couple of weeks...
I know how this bloke feels.
You do even more. Being stuck in the BBC bunker at a secret location in England gives me real insight into what you’ve been going through since March. I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemies.
I desperately feel like I need a pickup but the postponement of the final two Challenge Cup pool rounds wasn’t quite the same. This is all down to the French sports ministry banning travel to the UK for elite sport and you can see their point. Though whether this brings a halt to the Six Nations or the Champions League - both scheduled to start in mid-Feb - remains to be seen. The U20 Six Nations is now set for the Spring, with the Junior World Championship cancelled for a second straight year.
Beyond that, the three leagues are all in different directions. The Premiership want two weeks off (though many clubs appeared not to), the Top 14 are moving one whole round forward, while the Pro 14 have re-scheduled the postponed Leinster-Munster and Glasgow-Edinburgh games for this weekend.
Purely on Covid grounds - and my new day job draws me into contact with people who know their stuff - the number of cases is just starting to reduce nationally. As we’ve seen, the death rates normally respond around two weeks later, but you could see the logic in a two-week circuit break now with minimal impact on the Premiership. It’s possible to imagine a different perspective at the end of the month, without being complacent that we’re near a solution.
But chaos - and this runs pretty close to it - can be revealing. It perhaps reveals a sense of priority.
If the European competitions were the absolute priority for English clubs, would they be as determined to cancel games and leave EPCR scrambling to find alternative formats?
This chaos leaves the European competitions in a complete bind. There is no clear sense based on reporting on how teams would actually qualify for the knockout stages.
At the moment following two wins, Leicester are due to face Edinburgh but anything could happen.
COMMERCIALLY SPEAKING
This leads on to the more significant bits of news this week, which all affect the commercial side of the game.
The first was confirmation that CVC’s deal with the Six Nations is all but done. A reported £70m going into RFU coffers alone over that term - England and France get bigger stakes than Wales, Scotland and Ireland, with Italy the least - can’t hurt when the reported Covid loss is a reported £145m.
As mentioned ad nauseam, expect CVC to demand higher TV fees when the current deal expires in 2023, though they’ll do well in the current climate. More immediately, I was taken by this comment in the Daily Mail piece..
CVC are understood to have insisted that this year's Six Nations stay in its usual position in the calendar despite the disruption being caused to the fixture list, which was exacerbated yesterday by the suspension of the European Champions Cup and Challenge Cup creating an unwanted two-week circuit breaker in the season.
There is a good window of opportunity for TV audiences in February & March. Shove it to April and May, and you come up against any number of Cup finals as well as summer sports such as golf and cricket.
The second story sees a 2nd private equity firm, Silver Lake, looking to move into rugby by entering talks with the New Zealand Rugby Union, first reported in the Financial Times.
New Zealand Rugby’s commercial rights could be valued at $2bn, according to those with knowledge of the talks.
One thought..
New Zealand already play a shedload of matches but expect them to play even more in lucrative markets - Japan and the United States. After all, their recent games in the US - most notably the defeat to Ireland in Chicago - was because of their link to US insurance giants AIG and that contract comes to an end this year.
Playing England and France more often out of international windows would also be one lucrative option. Just saying…
COMING TO WELFORD ROAD SOON?
Julian Montoya’s one year contract with Western Force has fallen through. My sources tell me the same..
Sounds like - and I’ve been saying this for about six months - he’s heading a bit further north…
INTERESTING IDEA
Randall ✔️
Uren ✔️
Chris Cook (Signed from Bath last season) ✔️
And now…
Are Bristol and Leicester trying to pinch all the scrum-halves in the Premiership?
INTERESTING IDEA NO.2
Coloured bibs are being used to encourage lower tackling among amateur clubs in France.
Like the sound of this…
RUNNING FROM DEEP
1. A truly alarming article from Owen Slot in The Times as part of his week-long series on head injuries. (£)
He talks with Dr Ann McKee, professor of neurology and pathology at Boston University, where she is director of the CTE Centre and the Boston Brain Bank - and yes that means she has brains to do her research from.
The piece elicits the following:
“We have players who only played at amateur level, certainly college players,” she says.
“We’ve also seen CTE in high school and younger players. It isn’t so severe but we definitely see it. We have over 100 individuals who have died under the age of 34 and about 50 per cent of those have CTE.“You don’t have to be a professional player to get this disease. In fact, with kids starting young and playing through high school, they could have 12 years or longer of exposure to the sport, so that is a significant risk.”
Japan’s Top League is the one league we don’t talk about enough. It may be held up with a virus spike but ex-Wallabies coach Robbie Deans thinks it’s worth another look.
Thanks for your support once more for Welford Road Weekly, which thanks to that new job, is out a little later this week.
More next Wednesday and I’d be grateful if you could share the word before then.
Montoya's Western Force contract fell through because his wife was unable to get an Australian visa unfortunately.