In today's Times.
After Worcester fiasco, former England player tells Alex Lowe how sport he loves can be saved
Simon Halliday took a call last week from a bank seeking his advice on the opportunities within rugby. As a former England player and experienced rugby administrator who also spent 35 years working in finance, Halliday is uniquely placed to assess the rugby landscape.
He has just finished a six-year stint as chairman of European Professional Club Rugby (EPCR), having been on the boards of Bath, the RFU Championship and Esher, spent a decade on the RFU council and sat on Club England, the forerunner to the Professional Game Board (PGB).
Halliday positioned the sport to his banker friends as a value stock, a business with a lot of underlying value that was not being realised. But for rugby to unlock that potential, he believes changes must be made.
At the elite end, Halliday believes the Worcester Warriors fiasco and unfolding crisis at Wasps the result of a “dysfunctional system” and a “warning signal” that must be heeded by the RFU and Premiership Rugby (PRL).
He would create a joint venture between the clubs and the professional arm of the RFU, forming one standalone organisation empowered to run England, the Premiership and the Championship. In doing so, Halliday would end the influence of volunteers from the community game on the business of professional rugby.
Part two of Halliday’s manifesto is more painful, more personal. Despite his life-long love affair with the sport, he does not want his children playing rugby; not until he believes the authorities have taken meaningful action to make the game safer.
English Rugby LTD
Work has begun on the next club-country agreement, with both sides promising greater alignment than ever. But Halliday, who played a key role in striking the first club-country deal in 2008, believes the only way forward is for the RFU and PRL to form one organisation that runs professional rugby in England.
“I was asked in 2010, ‘Do you think the professional and amateur game should separate?’ I have no doubt that needs to happen,” Halliday says.
“You have got to break down whatever barriers there are to making good decisions. The structure does not allow for great decisions to be made, that is self evident. It is dysfunctional. The basis on which we are deciding things is adversarial.
“The Professional Game Board incorporates the RFU, the Premiership, the Championship and the players. It has become a political body whereas it should have been taking great decisions on behalf of the elite game in the context of the whole game.
“The chairman is Phil de Glanville. Why would you not super power that group and make the executive chairman the most important job in rugby union in this country?
“From an RFU perspective, the sooner they create a professional piece of their organisation and staff it beyond just Conor O’Shea [the director of performance rugby], the better — or we are all asking for trouble.”
The RFU council has final sign-off on major structural issues relating to the professional game in England, such as promotion and relegation in the Premiership.
“I was on the council for ten years and I know how valuable they are to the community game — but that is their area of expertise. They don’t want to be sitting there with the woes of the professional game in their in-tray,” Halliday says.
Halliday believes that creating one executive organisation would allow the clubs and England to pull in the same direction and forge more trust. In France, all clubs must open their books and prove they have a business plan that will get them through the season, avoiding a repeat of the Worcester situation.
“There has never been an open books policy for anyone, the RFU or Premiership Rugby, to ask, ‘What is your financial position? Are you sustainable? If you are in trouble will you tell us?’
“I sat on the Championship committee and the relationship with the RFU was appalling and it still is. None of the clubs have had any meaningful interaction with the RFU. They don’t know who to talk to.
“We need to create a group that makes sure it knows it is one game at the professional level. Rugby has all these structures that they have set up over the years — and now is the time to unwind it and change.”
The right side of history
Halliday is not affiliated to Progressive Rugby, the pressure group that lobbies for “better protection for players to ensure the game continues to thrive”, but he endorses all they stand for: mandatory controls on contact training, strict enforcement of a lower tackle height, fewer games, fewer tactical replacements and longer stand-down periods for concussion.
Hundreds of former players, including Steve Thompson and Ryan Jones, are suing World Rugby, the RFU and WRU for negligence after being diagnosed with early onset dementia.
“They don’t want to take the game down, they want the game to listen, they want the game to change. It’s quite difficult within the dysfunctional structures that exist to make it happen. It can only be pressure, and it can only be people speaking out,” Halliday says.
“I know what side of history I want to be on. I’ve had so much pleasure out of the last 10, 15, 20 years, but it’s tinged with such regret with how we have allowed the game to change.
“Take it back to how it used to be: remove the stamping, the kicking and gouging, which doesn’t happen anymore anyway, and you have got the cleanest, most wonderful game.
“What we have replaced that with is in some cases thuggery, which is doing real damage. I had to deal with roughness but the hits people take now are frightening.
“We need to go back to the future. Take contact out of the training. Forcibly stop high tackles. Put a line on the jersey if you have to. The jackal is creating a lot of injuries.
“The current group of players are scared for their future because they have had so many head injuries. They don’t say anything because it is their jobs.
“We have got to deal with it. It is up to us. The narrative has to change from administrators so the school gate is not full of people saying, ‘I am not putting my son through that’.
“Let’s bring some joy back into the game. I want all three of my little ones playing rugby but I will not have them knocked around because head impacts are accepted as part of the game.
“Rugby is the heart and soul of who I am — and I am seeing the game I know turn into something else, being kicked around by administrators.”
Always a Wasp
Topic: Simon Halliday’s manifesto for reform of ‘dysfunctional’ English rugby (Read 904 times)