BlueBlue wrote:our strategy with the welsh should be to put ourselves into a position where the welsh, or more accurately the RRW are not needed. The Pro-12 needs to be viable without the welsh RRW. The major pressure point thAT PRL can apply TO THE irfu is by flirting with the RRW, and attracting them over to their side with offers that will never happen. The PRL and the RRW doing this is no great mystery or conspiracy, they are suits not blazers, they are one and the same club owners. The RRW will always be coming from a different prospective than the IRFU. RRW and PRL are natural bedfellows, IRFU/ WRU and RRW are chalk and cheese. What would be shocking therefore is not that the RRW might be followed again, but rather it would be shocking if we, Irish rugby people and the IRFU were surprised again.
The answer is simple, Italy Ireland and Scotland need to create a competition that is viable without the RRW, that does not mean that RRW are excluded, it simply means we can say good bye to them in the event that they get fooled again. This takes away PRL's pressure point and RRW position of king maker. If Scotland, Italy and Ireland work together we can be very powerful, but it has to be from a position of being viable on our own. PRL are not really our problem, PRL are just an entity pulling the most out for itself. If the IRFU are disappointed in this, they need to grow up, if we the fans don't understand that this is the way it is, we need to grow up. There are a number of ways we can have a viable Pro-12 without the RRW, the easiest of which is to support the WRU in bringing contract sharing to Wales, if the WRU held 50% of the pro-contracts of 30 to 40 welsh players that would effectively tie the RRW into the WRU, also the WRU owning 1 of the 3 teams could be a way to go, the WRU had this opportunity when they bailed out Scarlet's, also the own a substantial share in Dragons. Of course the RRW wont want this, but there are ways of forcing it to happen. The other things that might be done are...
Make Connacht truly competitive.
Make Edinburgh Truly competitive.
Make Zebre more competitive and look at the possibility of 1 more Italian team.
Start a Div 2 made up of Pro-12 academy teams and teams from Romania, Georgia, Belgium, Portugal and Spain. The idea of a div 2 is to get 2nd tier nations teams to progress to a level where they could join the Pro 10 or 12 if the RRW were to leave. We all know the RRW will not leave, but the RRW can threaten, and the PRL can leverage this.
Understand where you are coming from in this and appreciate why you feel this way but I really believe that we need to try to work to getting the Welsh regions more competitive so that the game in Europe becomes stronger rather than as a defence mechanism against the RRW threatening to leave.
I would like to see a scenario where the Pro12 is demonstrably a stronger league that the AP for example. We don't have this at the moment but if by way of example the sides that are say 7th - 10th in the Pro12 are regularly beating sides from the AP in whatever the new Amlin CC is then there is a renewed argument (not that I suspect to ever succeed) that on merit the Pro12 should have more teams in the European Cup. I suspect the French and English will say that if this occurs the Pro12 will get an 8th side in the EC from next season because the play offs allow one extra place this way.
But the truth is that the new division of money will in the long run anyway harm the sides outside England and France. That is of course the major flaw in the new competition. It will make England and France far stronger and weaken the Pro12 sides. Whether the old system was unfair can be argued (and maybe it was) but the new one is no fairer in a sporting sense. In fact it will diminish the four Pro12 nations not improve them.
I would also welcome a second tier Pro12, but the trouble is that this would require significant investment and with a smaller share of European Cup money this in fact looks further away rather than closer.
If however there is really to be a third tier European Competition then perhaps we should use this as an embryonic Pro12 promotion/relegation competition. If the last team in the Pro12 drops down to this competition and the winner of it is promoted to the Pro12 (maybe a playoff between 11th and the runner up) we might use this to truly develop the Pro12 into a more competitive league. I haven't examined the numbers though, but if the EC will lose 4 teams to what was the Amlin presumably there is less room there for teams from Portugal, Spain, Romania etc. This suggestion would only work if Tier 2 Europe did not already have Spanish, Portuguese, Georgian, Romanian sides, and/or if there were no French or English teams in the Tier 3 European Competition.
[I was recently surprised at the interest in Rugby in Spain. Only last month I was asked by the head of a firm in Madrid for recommendations of restaurants in Cardiff(!) because the he was bringing
ten people from Madrid to Cardiff to see Wales Scotland on the last day of the 6 Nations.]