Welsh rugby faces fight for survival

In the joyless, frost-hardened reaches of bloody-nosed Welsh rugby this week, there is a rare consensus. It stretches all the way down from the godhead, Gareth Edwards, to the gloomiest inhabitant of a ghost-ridden little clubhouse in the furthest flung valley.

Everyone agrees. Welsh rugby, the battered pride of the nation and still reeling from last weekend's defeat by Italy in Rome, has to change – or die.

"I never thought I would say this," says Edwards, "but I have to agree that for once what happens on the field against England is dwarfed by an extraordinary general meeting of the Welsh Rugby Union on Sunday."

You know there is something up – something momentous – when Wales' ultimate action man (who said, after repelling a trumpeted English revival as the greatest of Welsh teams began to wind down in the late 1970s: "They would have had to dig a hole for us out there on Arms Park if we hadn't won because we just couldn't have lived with ourselves if we had lost to the English today") elevates a gathering of "ala-kad-oos" in the Princess Royal theatre in Port Talbot above battle with the oldest enemy at the Millennium Stadium in Cardiff this afternoon.

Ala-kad-oos? In valley-speak it means blazered figures of authority, not necessarily of malign or pompous spirit, but men who carry the whiff of the committee room rather than the trenches and who have a deadly tendency to make a "dog's dinner" of the simplest administrative snack.

Tomorrow David Moffett, the hard-driving WRU chief executive who made his reputation in such high-profile roles as boss of the Australian and New Zealand rugby unions and czar of Super Twelve and Tri-Nations competition, quite simply wants to change the face of Welsh rugby. He wants four major league Welsh clubs formed from the mergers of Cardiff with Pontypridd, Neath with Bridgend, Swansea with Llanelli, and Newport with Ebbw Vale.

Moffett, reared in Kenya and Australia and shaped by a new age of sport, wants a streamlined game geared to professional, business-orientated thinking. But what he might get is civil war and punishing court action. He proposes that budgets of £1.8m be handed to each of the regionalised mega-clubs from WRU television and gate returns, but, below the newly formed big league, pickings will be meagre indeed.

Llanelli's chief executive, Stuart Gallacher, a former Welsh international, insists on keeping his own counsel before tomorrow's meeting but he does say: "Yes, I too concur with the idea that what happens tomorrow will determine the rest of Welsh rugby's life. It is the most important day since rugby went open. We have to get this right because if we don't the game as we know it in Wales could well be finished."

Gallacher's Llanelli and Cardiff are widely expected to fight legally for their old identity. The idea of becoming farm clubs for the new regional giants while peeling off to form a new 16-club semi-professional "Premier" league smacks not so much of reform as enforced humiliation. Moffett says it is the future. Gallacher and the Cardiff chairman, Peter Thomas, and his friend and fellow director Gareth Edwards, may decide that obliterating the past is too high a price for a hastily arranged future – and especially one which comes without guarantees.

At Cardiff they will point to the pictures of Gareth and Cliff Morgan and Rex Willis and Wilf Wooller and say you cannot simply vote away such a tradition.

At the village of Bedwas, in the Newport valley, they will say that they, too, have a tradition and it is one that in recent years has become utterly remarkable with a march from the sixth division of Welsh rugby to the first. But earlier this week their secretary, Weldon Davies, was reeling from new WRU proposals – that dropped through the letterbox of his house across from the ground – threatening financial oblivion.

Said Davies: "Under the original proposals the worst we faced was continuing as a semi-professional club in the First Division... now the way it is looking we have to make sure we finish no lower than seventh and win a place in the new semi-professional Premiership of 16 clubs.

"If we don't do that we drop from a subsidy of £50,000 from the WRU to £8,000, which is what every Welsh club receives. We just can't exist on that while running five teams, paying public liability, insurance and transport costs. Change has to come – everybody knows that. But the goalposts are being shifted all the time and frankly it's a bit scary."

Davies, at 63 a retired sales executive for a cider company, is the quintessential Welsh rugby man. As a boy he played for Bedwas, "when the only black face you saw was a miner who'd come straight from his shift. The rugby club was the heartbeat of the village. It was a citadel. Now after a game or training, you see it empty and it does make you sad. There's no doubt the problem is cultural as well as financial.

"The villages have been decimated, and of course the world has changed. In my day as a lad you waited for the fixture list to see when you would get out of the village. Maesteg – that was exotic. I worry now that if we lost the WRU money the first thing is that we will have to cut at least one of our teams, and then what happens to the player base? Less players, less chance of producing a few of the old great ones."

Bedwas usually draw a crowd of around 200, though recently their Cup tie with Newport attracted five times that number. "Mind you," reports Davies, " a lot came up from Newport. We didn't do badly on the field, 27-10, and they had Percy Montgomery playing for them and the referee didn't do us any favours. Awarded a penalty try first time the scrum collapsed. Bit hard, that. However, we did fantastic in bar takings."

Davies coached junior teams for Cardiff for 30 years. Terry Holmes, the fine scrum-half, was one of his particular favourites. "He was proud of every shirt he wore," says Davies, "including his training shirt – and that was full of holes. You do worry that you'll ever get that back. Losing to Italy wasn't the end of the world. I thought they were the better team on the day. But how did the boys take it? How much did they hurt? That's what you think about.

"Back when the game went 'open' we went to bed as amateurs and woke up professionals. So much has changed in the game. A Tongan came to our club and his first words were 'How much?' My second word was 'off'. The best way I could describe my mood going to Port Talbot is apprehensive. Apprehensive that we don't make the right decisions. Apprehensive that we make a lot of new problems for ourselves. I don't say the game will die in Wales, but you would be a fool if you didn't recognise the problems."

After the WRU, the next act booked at the Princess Royal is Paul Lamb and the Snakekings. Appropriately enough, they sing the blues.