IT WILL BE almost 11 months before this rugby season concludes with the Lions’ third Test against Australia in Sydney.
The Wallabies’ current form suggests there won’t be much to talk about then, either — but this last weekend of pre-season in Ireland and the UK is usually a quiet one as half the clubs taper off their summer training and the rest shadow-box against each other in preparatory friendlies.
Nature has its means of telling us things are about to get serious. A volcano will usually grumble before it erupts. A bird will typically find it more difficult to fly in the lower air-pressure system that precedes a storm, and so it’ll perch. The British rugby media will lob a grenade about league mergers just before we all get swept away by the madness of the club season on either side of the Irish Sea.
The Telegraph’s story on Thursday — ‘Premiership considering merger with URC to form British and Irish league’ — is rugby’s equivalent of another headline we tend to see at this time of year about Massive Spiders Invading our Homes.
Much like those spiders, the Premiership isn’t actually getting any bigger but it will crawl in your window in search of a mate. And that bloody window is always open: rugby can’t afford air conditioning.
There is no doubting the validity of Gavin Mairs’ and Charles Richardson’s report that Premiership clubs would be open to forming a British and Irish league as a means of bolstering TV revenue. The Premiership, which takes in less than a quarter of the TV revenue that the French Top 14 commands, would be stupid not to explore expansion ahead of the next rights bids in 2026.
It is the URC, though, which would need to be propositioned, and not the other way around.
The league moved quickly last night to deny that any discussions had taken place regarding a British and Irish League. And the URC had to say something: the merger mooted by the Premiership board would not involve Benetton or Zebre, nor would it include the South African franchises whose infusion has transformed the URC from the butt of a joke to rivalling the Premiership as an entertainment product in the space of three seasons, and who will become official shareholders next year. More pertinently still, South Africa is a massive TV market and the URC’s next rights deal will likely eclipse that of Super Rugby, not to mind the Premiership which it already dwarfs.
But for all that it may have offered the illusion of stability, the URC’s statement on Friday night probably isn’t worth much in its own right, ultimately.
League officials may not have held talks with their Premiership equivalents but the URC is only as strong as its composite parts, and it would be naive to assume that the Irish, Scottish and Welsh unions don’t occasionally shoot the breeze with their English counterparts about potential business. They each have their own interests to protect.
Equally, though, for all of the enthrallment of the on-field rivalry between the two nations, the IRFU and SA Rugby have become tight in recent years. It’s understood that the IRFU would be open to some kind of URC-Premiership amalgamation only if the South Africans, as well as Six Nations partners Italy, remained part of the fold.
Of course, it’s easier to take such a holistic stance when you’re ordering the expensive seafood at the restaurant table. Ospreys, meanwhile, will have a small pizza, Scarlets a cup of soup, and Dragons will stick to the side salad.
Premiership clubs, too, loathe travelling to South Africa in the Champions Cup, a competition which should be giving thought to its last meal.
To say the quiet part out loud, only seven or eight teams truly care about Europe’s top-tier competition and four of them are in Ireland. None of them are in South Africa, either, and SA Rugby becoming EPCR stakeholders next June will likely be too late to save the competition, at least in its current guise.
In the event that a British and Irish league was to form down the line, it’s proposed that a straight knockout competition involving the French would also be interspersed into the calendar. It doesn’t sound as grotesque as it might have a decade ago.
Down south, meanwhile, Super Rugby, is on life support.
Michael Cheika, who coached the Waratahs to a title in 2014, told Off The Ball on Monday that Australia should pull out of the competition altogether and set up its own fully professional franchise league.
On Friday, former All Black wing Izzy Dagg lamented the removal of the South African franchises from Super Rugby on his SENZ radio show.
“I can’t understand how we’ve done it,” said Dagg. “We’ve talked about it on the show and read all the conversations online and people are like, ‘Well you got rid of us, you don’t want us.’
“I’m just thinking how the hell do we not want South Africa a part of our own system here? It’s been a downward spiral [since they left].”
The South African franchises were merely collateral in rugby’s constant tension between growing the game and self-preservation.
It will be Australia and Argentina who get shafted in 2026 when the Springboks host the All Blacks for a tour series which will forcibly remove the Rugby Championship from that year’s calendar, and again in 2030 when the South Africans travel the other way.
“A bit of an old-school tour, you’ve got a group of 60-odd (players), midweek and Tests,” said All Blacks head coach Scott Robertson upon the launch of the concept last week. “That’s a genuine tour, two biggest rivals. It’s a throwback in time and it’s what you need right now in world rugby.”
One wonders if such a nostalgia rush might amplify the sentiment expressed by Izzy Dagg in the aftermath of the countries’ most recent meetings. What if it suddenly made commercial sense for all parties to start a blast-from-the-past club competition in the southern hemisphere and call it, I dunno, Super 12?
It’s unlikely, of course — but if someone told you 15 years ago that Glasgow would upset the Bulls to lift the Celtic League title at Loftus Versfeld in 2024, you’d have advised them to seek help.
Whatever shape club rugby takes in the northern hemisphere in the years to come, pulling the drawbridge up in front of the South Africans and/or the Italians should be considered a dealbreaker.
At the URC’s current rate of growth, the numbers may dictate as much one way or the other.
But one of the few guaranteed fixtures in rugby’s calendar is that we’ll be talking about some form of British and Irish league until someone closes that bloody window.
