"Martyn Phillips, the chairman of Premiership Rugby (PRL), explained last week that the league could not endorse a situation where clubs were able to shed debt in administration but retain full access to central funding, arguing it would create inequality and act as a bad precedent."
Whereas persistent cheating and largely getting away with it creates no inequality and acts as an excellent precedent of course. All clubs are equal, but some are more equal than others.
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We can't pay our players. Saracens paid their players too much. Clearly different situations. Ones cheating and another is complete collapse of a company.
Saracens were punished and in my opinion aren't cheating anymore. They are still unlikable as hell and I hate them. I think the prem have treated both situations correctly.
Clearly Saracens should've been stripped for assets and banned indefinitely. And our debt should've magically paid off. But sadly people, that isn't realistic!
Saracens were guilty of the biggest cheating scandal in British professional sport (I can’t think of another). They cheated the league, the English game, their fellow professionals both on and off the pitch, and did it with a leering arrogance. They still refused to open their books even when punished. They should have been relegated a few divisions, stripped of their P share, stripped of their titles and their squad disbanded.
I don’t want to turn this thread into an anti-Saracens piece, but the fact they got away with it for so long and then were so lightly punished in relation to what they did, contributed to the rising debts in other clubs who were trying to keep up - a lot through trying to attract and pay players, but also losing players that they had invested heavily in, eg at the outset, Billy V, Hodgson, Wigglesworth, Borthwick, ongoing to include the likes of Strettle, Johnson, Singleton, Daly, Ashton etc. They freely cherry picked from other clubs who had to break the bank to keep up having also been nobbled trying to replace their investments.
But it’s impossible to keep up with someone financially doping and clubs like us are the first to fall. I thought our galactico squad of 2017 was madness as we surely were way beyond our means, even though we were attracting big crowds.
Can you imagine Lance Armstrong being caught cheating for all those years, being fined an ‘inconvenient’ sum of money, allowed to keep his titles, told he had to go away for a year and requalify but could come back as long as he wasn’t cheating still, but refused to have a drugs test anyway? There would have been uproar. This feels how it’s gone with saracens - the key point being the impact and damage as a result has been greater on the competition and the other clubs than it is on saracens themselves.
We are one of the first to fall in trying to keep up and be sustainable. We’d clearly taken the decision to develop exciting young prospects and sprinkle that with some wise overseas buys, ditch the DoR role and hope that kept us competitive. We were going to fight to keep in the top eight for a few years, but with the youngsters like Charlie, Porter, Spink, Oghre, Alfie, etc alongside Launch, Robson, the Willis brothers, would soon of had a golden group that would have had us challenging. We’d decided we couldn’t keep up with the money sides and would develop talent instead.
This is why it grates with me so much and I’m prattling on here. The club spent the last 2/3 seasons on a journey to becoming financially viable with the added bonus of developing outstanding talent for Wasps and England. We were prepared to compromise domestic success to do so. So when PRL and the RFU steadfastly refuse to let us retain our P share and survive, they are refusing to acknowledge the sensible approach we’ve taken and the rewards they can reap from it. Instead they treat us more harshly than proven cheats who I can imagine are now so powerful within both bodies that they are pushing the short sighted agenda for a 10 club league along with some other ‘big’ clubs, with their eyes on the money they will get from our P share. The PRL and RFU should be protecting the interests of the game, not the big clubs, and should be looking at the sensible approach we’ve taken on the pitch that it will benefit English rugby in the longer term. Instead they’ve decided rules are rules (unless you are the cheats) and it’s better to smash up a special group that Wasps have invested in and developed through sheer hard work. It’s now all about riches rather than potential.
Sorry for the rant! I’d better go and lie down in a dark room now…
Always a Wasp
