English rugby’s bold new era appears set to belatedly begin. Nearly 12 months since the Rugby Football Union chief executive, Bill Sweeney, bullishly said that English rugby was “on the cusp of something spectacular” the time has arrived to demonstrate why. The much vaunted Professional Game Partnership is set to be unveiled, the agreement that governs how club and country coexist and cooperate, but amid the triumphalism we can expect at Twickenham on Wednesday, there is trepidation too.
These eight-year agreements are not easy to formulate but that said, progress has been painstaking of late. There is a degree of cynicism from within the Premiership that it has taken until a few weeks before the season begins for clarity to emerge, and concerns that negotiations with players over their enhanced contracts have hit roadblocks along the way. “Slow, slow” was how Ellis Genge described the progress only a couple of weeks ago.
Perhaps cynicism should be set aside for now. Just a couple of years into the previous agreement, Sweeney’s predecessor was moaning it was too expensive. Two years ago, Sweeney said “everyone is fed up” with the existing structure – a damning indictment of the state of the game in England – and he has made it his priority to improve it. It was not by coincidence that Simon Massie-Taylor, with whom he worked at the British Olympic Association and the RFU, became Premiership Rugby’s chief executive and a deal has been eventually been thrashed out.
It is set to be worth around £33m a year to the clubs – a significant uplift on the previous deal – and will give England a greater degree of control over their players. Steve Borthwick has licence to hand out up to 25 enhanced contracts, worth a guaranteed £160,000 per player per season – rather than the previous £25,000-a-match appearance fees – and has more of a say over strength and conditioning and medical decisions for all 50 members of the elite player squad.
The rub is that there is nothing that officially gives Borthwick final say over when a player appears on a given week, nor in what position they might feature. The players are happy in theory with the security the new deal will provide but there have been concerns of late the RFU cannot afford to give out all 25 contracts. If lingering issues remain they must be resolved as a priority.
The general mood in the Premiership is somewhere between cautious optimism and apprehension. An acknowledgment that the occasions when friction will occur are likely to be few, at the same time that some friction is inevitable. Ultimately, the final say rests with the club but as Exeter’s Rob Baxter said recently, “the crux to it is that S&C and medical decisions will be made by the England head coach. Selection for Premiership and European Cup games will be made by the club’s DoR. It doesn’t take a great deal of working out to go, ‘Well, if you are in control of someone’s medical decisions, you’re deciding when they play really, aren’t you?’”
Clearly the first priority is for Borthwick to do something about the empty desks in England’s strength and conditioning department. The exits of Aled Walters and Tom Tombleson have come at a bad time because the successful management of players’ seasons requires trust and in-built relationships between those responsible for strength and conditioning, for medical decisions for club and country.
Moreover, it requires more planning than is realistically possible in a sport with an attrition rate like rugby’s to plan a player’s game-time across a season. All the more so when squad sizes have shrunk across the league. There is a maximum of 28 matches a club could play this season and England players are supposed to be unavailable for only two. There are nine England matches, meaning a potential of 35 fixtures with a British & Irish Lions tour to follow. It is understood that the players are determined to avoid a repeat of last season’s scenario which saw Maro Itoje exceed the threshold of playing minutes – equivalent to 30 full matches – so something has to give.
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The clubs might argue it should not always be them to bear the brunt. That players should rest on England time as well as club, though the RFU would no doubt point to the £33m it is paying the clubs. Like Baxter, Northampton’s director of rugby Phil Dowson has his concerns. “You sometimes get guys who need an injection on a joint and that might need a week or two weeks off,” he said. “If that is just before the Six Nations starts, does he miss the last [club] game for Saints to be available for England? If you start taking players out because you are saving them, effectively, to play for England, then that becomes an issue. I don’t think conflict will happen very often, but it’s interesting to see whom they appoint to arbitrate how that goes.”
It is a view that largely reflects those around the Premiership and when speaking to officials across the league over the summer the phrase that comes up most is that “the proof will be in the pudding”. You get the sense that most would settle for solid progress, let alone spectacular.