The national team may be heading to the Rugby World Cup with legitimate claims to be one of the favourites, but the club game in Wales is still giving cause for concern. Especially in the Premiership, where Pontypool have again missed out on promotion despite an astonishing record. It’s a farce, says Robin Davey, in his latest column for Dai Sport. And don’t get him started on plans for a new summer competition.
Wales may be thriving at international level, but below that the situation is far from satisfactory and in the case of the Premiership it has even descended into farce.
It can’t be right, for example, that Pontypool are unable to secure promotion to the Premiership though they have won 65 out of 66 games in the Championship over the past three seasons.
And looking to the future there is supposed to be a competition taking place next May and June – yes, that’s right in May and June – between the six leading Premiership clubs and six Scottish teams, some of them newly created.
Yet the Welsh Premiership clubs say they’ve heard nothing official about this competition and they don’t even know which clubs are supposed to be taking part in it.
And even if it does eventually go ahead who is going to pay for it? How are clubs going to afford visits to Scotland when the WRU are cutting funding to the Premiership?
And given that the league is semi-professional the players taking part in it are part-time and have jobs to do and families to support. How are they going to get time off to travel to Scotland and who is going to compensate them?
Furthermore, who wants to be playing rugby in the summer month of June anyway? Many players will be on holiday with their families.
It just doesn’t add up and it wouldn’t come as a surprise if the competition doesn’t even go ahead.
And it’s outrageous that Pontypool have to endure yet another season in the Championship when they have carried all before them there for the past three years.
No less a figure than Wales lock Ian Gough has said on social media “I think its badly wrong. You build a team for the division you’re playing in, it’s very disheartening for anyone involved with an aspirational club.
“At the very most it should have been a play-off against the bottom club. Pontypool have earned the right to be in a higher league.”
As it was, their play-off against Llanelli was loaded against them. Even though they have done remarkably well in the Championship it was asking a lot for them to beat a team which finished a full five places off the bottom of the Premiership who had been playing at a higher level all through the season.
And Llanelli were able, quite legitimately, to field half-a-dozen players who had featured in regional rugby during the season. Hardly a level playing field then.
And overriding all of these farcical events is the decision of the WRU to reduce the Premiership to 12 clubs from the current 16.
How are clubs expected to survive on just 11 meaningful home games in a season? Even with the full complement of 16, Neath nearly went under during the season and Cross Keys were forced to go public pleading for £25,000 just to keep going for the rest of the season.
Others are known to be in trouble, Pontypridd and Ebbw Vale, who are already losing players of the calibre of Rhys Jones and talisman Ronnie Kynes to Merthyr and Bargoed, respectively, to name but two while Newport are worried about their future once the money they received from the WRU as compensation for taking over their ground runs out.
Sure, Pontypool will be playing in more derbies next season with Cross Keys, Bedwas and Bargoed, along with Neath, relegated.
But that’s not the point. There should be a thriving 16-team Premiership- with Pontypool in it. End of.