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Big questions overshadow good times at Gloucester

'We'll battle until we drop to win the league, and if we manage it, we'll look on the play-off thing as another competition'

Chris Hewett
Saturday 28 December 2002 01:00 GMT
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Gloucester will still be top of the Premiership tonight, regardless of the outcome of their almighty rumble with Northampton at Franklin's Gardens this afternoon, and their advantage at the end of Christmas week begs three questions. Will the West Countrymen be able to protect their five-point lead over the next 19 weeks? If they succeed in finishing top of the heap, will the outcome of the Twickenham Grand Final at the end of May mean diddly-squat to anyone with half a brain? And will all this matter anyway if the élite club game disappears in a fog of political acrimony and bankruptcy?

Nigel Melville, the director of rugby at Kingsholm and one of the most successful coaches of the professional era, would like to concentrate his thoughts on the first of those issues. Gloucester are better placed to withstand the pressures of a long run-in this time than they were during the 1999-2000 campaign, when they were top at Christmas but then lost five of their remaining 11 fixtures.

"In a way, we've already been through our lean patch," Melville said this week. "We've had injuries to our props – Trevor Woodman is still out, although he's running again after his neck operation – and been muddling through with one hooker. James Simpson-Daniel has missed games, Andy Hazell has been limping around for most of the season. And we do not have the worst programme ahead of us. Northampton, a very good side, will soon be behind us. We've been to Leicester, to Wasps and to Bath, where we never win. All things considered, we'd settle for what we have to come."

If only life were that simple. Melville knows better than most that, if Gloucester maintain, or even extend, their advantage between now and 10 May, when they run down the curtain on the regular season with a tasty little home game against dear old Leicester, they will not be champions. Not officially, at any rate.

Following a false start a couple of seasons back, when the power-suited modernists at the top end of the club game tried to concoct a winner-take-all final midway through the campaign and were laughed out of court, that very arrangement is now on the rugby statute book. All Gloucester would get for finishing top after 22 matches in all winds and weathers is an automatic place at Twickers. Thanks a million.

While Melville insists he is relaxed about the change of format – "I can't say I'm too hung up on it," he smiled – he is not among its most devoted apologists. "We'll battle until we drop to win the league, and if we manage it, we'll look on the play-off thing as another competition," he said, in direct contravention of the party line as dictated by Premier Rugby. "If we play in the Grand Final and lose, well, I think I'd know who could claim to be the best team in England, and most other rugby people would know too.

"I'm more than happy for the game to try out new ideas, because until they're tried we can't assess their value. But I want us to win the league. Who the hell is going to sit here and say: 'We want to finish third and have a shot at making the final'?"

The difficulty from Melville's perspective, and the perspective of every other professional coach who has spent years of his working life dragging English rugby a few steps up the mountainside, is that the Premiership clubs are careering towards the biggest financial crisis since the domestic game went open in 1996. Leicester may have turned a decent profit last year, and Northampton may have finished a few bob in the black, but the bigger picture is so painfully bleak it might have been painted by Goya.

The recent rumblings over relegation and the depressingly messy slush fund affair are both side-effects of a commercial disease that has "terminal" written all over it. The disease goes by the name of penury.

One senior member of the England hierarchy this week described the situation as "close to collapse, as close as we have seen it". The Premiership owners are, according to Bristol's Malcolm Pearce, losing £15m a season, a figure said to be on the low side by many of Pearce's peers, and are not prepared to take many steps further down that road.

They do not believe the central funding arrangement with the Rugby Football Union is working properly – some accuse it of not working, full stop – and talk privately about the RFU attempting to "starve them out of the sport".

This kind of language has not been heard since the dark days of Cliff Brittle's chairmanship of the governing body. The outlook is not good. Not good at all.

This grieves Melville, as it would grieve anyone working at the coal-face of a Premiership that has become wildly successful in terms of playing standards and audience generation.

"This is definitely the most competitive tournament we have seen," he maintained. "Why? Because professional club rugby has produced such tremendous improvements, both among the players and in the way the game is approached.

"There are no weak sides in the Premiership this season. The players are fitter, quicker, stronger, better prepared. Their skill levels are so much better. We are talking about a sport unbelievably better than it was in '96. Go back and look at some of the stuff being played then, the shift upwards has been enormous," argues Melville.

"It is of obvious concern to all of us involved in the club game that so much of the work that has been done could be undone almost instantly. Look at the England team. Year on year, the national side is more competitive, more successful. Premiership rugby underpins it: you would have to be fairly daft not to understand that.

"If we lose what we have – and from what I understand, we are really very close to a major problem in the financing of the Premiership – it will be a seriously bad day for English union," he warns.

So there you have it, as we move into World Cup year: an England team flying high, with a clean sweep of victories over the southern hemisphere superpowers in the collective kitbag; and a Premiership that is compelling on the field but destitute off it, searching for a route out of the red and running up cul-de-sacs by the dozen.

Nothing adds up. Newcastle are investing millions of pounds in improving their Kingston Park stadium; Northampton have just thrown open the doors of the magnificent Franklin's Gardens; Wasps have just attracted a first sell-out crowd to their latest home at Adams Park. But undermining all this is a balance sheet of deepest crimson.

When England's coach, Clive Woodward, last took a red rose side into a World Cup, in 1999, the Premiership clubs had just ended a boycott of European rugby and a season of rebel matches against Cardiff and Swansea. Four years on, the game is bracing itself for more turmoil. The more things change in English rugby – and they have changed hugely for the better, as Melville eloquently pointed out – the more they stay the same.

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