• Help Support The Rugby Forum :

Mark Evans leaves the Melbourne Storm...

ratsapprentice

Hall of Fame
TRF Legend
Joined
Jan 25, 2013
Messages
12,094
Country Flag
England
Club or Nation
England
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-04-...s-announces-resignation-from-nrl-club/6401400

I, for one, hope that he comes back and gets a senior role either in the RFU or PRL.

Here's why:

"We are in thrall to the idea of the market in this country," he says. "We believe that if the market doesn't solve something, there is no solution to be found. In the sporting context, all the evidence from around the world gives the lie to that belief, but we can't seem to get past it. It's garbage. It's intellectually flabby and completely wrong-headed. If we allow market forces to operate untrammelled â€" let's say through the sanctioning of another significant hike in the salary cap, or scrapping it altogether â€" the dream of making professional rugby union a genuinely national game will be an impossible dream." But he is in no doubt that a better model exists, if only those at the top were bold enough to piece it together. "I remain," he says, "an unashamed supporter of a franchise system. Do we really think it's healthy for our sport to be dependent on the largesse of a small group of individuals? Please. Do we really want to see more clubs disappear and more areas of the country become barren land for union? It still grieves me to think of what has happened to Wakefield and West Hartlepool and Moseley. I hope this doesn't happen, but the same thing could happen to Bristol. People say that for every one of those, there has been a Worcester and an Exeter. I don't buy that.
"A franchise system would make growing the game infinitely easier. For a start, it would be possible to introduce differential funding â€" a system used with great success in Australian Rules. They understood that a new team like the Sydney Swans, based in a rugby league hotbed, could not possibly compete from the get-go with the long-established teams in Melbourne without a lot of help. What happened? They gave them more money from the central pot than everyone else received as a means of accelerating their development. It was the kind of bright thinking that helped make Aussie Rules the biggest sporting success story in the country, and one of the biggest in the world.
"We could do that here, with rugby. Given certain conditions, it is possible to build a successful club virtually from scratch. You need a town of around 100,000 people, with another 400,000 or so in the surrounding catchment area. You need a location with very little professional football, preferably none at all, and no rival regional passion, like rugby league in the north. The places that spring to mind are Cornwall, Kent and, probably, Cambridge. But the only way it can happen under the present system is through some wondrous individual act of philanthropy, and who in their right mind is going to spend £20m on a stadium and God knows how much more on players in the knowledge that it could take six years to reach the Premiership and one to be relegated? There's a word for that, and it's 'madness'.
"Strange as it may sound, coming from someone who has worked in the professional club game through all the political battles with the Rugby Football Union, the only organisation with enough clout to push through a really ambitious programme of change is the governing body, but I'm not convinced it truly knows what it wants to see on its territory. In fact, I don't think many of the people there have the faintest clue what they're after. I first played rugby in England when I was 21. I'm 51 now, and I'm not at all sure they have any better idea now than they had then. The issue of the optimum framework for professional club rugby here has been filed away in the back of the 'too difficult' cabinet."
In Evans' view, the salary cap debate currently being staged by the Premiership power brokers must be won by those arguing against a rise â€" that is to say, those not representing Leicester, Northampton, Saracens and Bath, who just happen to be four of the five wealthiest clubs in the country. The free-marketeers point to the leading French clubs, who have mega-budgets that are growing more mega by the season and, as a consequence of their ability to attract players, are the dominant force in the European rugby economy. It is not an argument Evans finds persuasive. "If players want to go, let 'em," he says. "We have the biggest playing population of any country. Isn't it just a little paranoid to be worrying about that?
"There are all sorts of reasons why French rugby generates the money it does," he continues, "but the biggest one is this: you can draw a line across from Bordeaux, down the Rhône and run it from Provence in the east to Biarritz in the far south-west. There are around 25 million people living in that area, and if you take Marseilles out of it, rugby is the main spectator sport. Nowhere else in the world is there a bigger market, and if you add the regeneration of rugby in Paris â€" a capital city with one professional football team, as opposed to London's 14 â€" it will take a lot more than a rise in the salary cap to compete on their terms.
"We have to think differently. If you want the English club game to amount to three or four Gullivers playing in Lilliput â€" if you want to create the rugby version of Scottish football â€" a spike in the salary cap now will take you there. Is that where people want to be? God, I hope not."


Pwease, pwease, pwease someone in English rugby hire him.
 

Latest posts

Top