Government by decree is strangling rugby

I suppose that if you were a fan of either Leinster or Saracens last weekend’s Champions Cup quarterfinal was a tense and gripping encounter. That indeed seems to have been the view of some reporters, though their judgement may have been influenced by Saracens’ admirable determination to show that the penalty imposed on the club for financial misdemeanours hasn’t broken their spirit. Even those who rarely feel kindly towards Saracens must surely admire their bloody-mindedness.

Nevertheless, for the neutral it was a depressing game. The first really big game of the autumn was marked by a complete absence of imagination and any sense of adventure. The set scrums took an age, frequently reset, as players seemed more interested in winning a penalty than getting the ball to their backs. Then the breakdown was a mess; so many bodies were on the ground that the referee might justifiably have awarded a penalty after almost ever tackle. Both sides were equally culpable.

Leinster were guilty of collaboration. Saracens had come to Dublin to play a certain sort of game. They would seek to dominate upfront and then have Richard Wigglesworth put pressure on Leinster by his always well-directed box-kicks. They would choke the life out of Leinster, and Leinster obligingly consented to being choked. They made little attempt to vary their game, instead doing the same thing time and again in the fond hope that there would be a different outcome. Only near the end with defeat staring them in the face did they trust their backs – and score a lovely try. One would have thought that a player of Johnny Sexton’s intelligence and vast experience would have realized quite early that Leinster should change tactics and ask other, more difficult, questions of Saracens.

Of course, all sport offers you drab and dreary matches from time to time. It couldn’t be otherwise. It has never been otherwise. To say that this match in Dublin was the professional game at its most turgid and least ambitious may be true, but those of us old enough to recall the amateur game will know how dreadful some matches were then. I remember that after an hour of the 1988 Calcutta Cup at Murrayfield, I no longer cared who won. I just wanted it over.

If professional rugby is in severe difficulty today, it is not because of what happens on the field. It is because all national unions and, by inevitable extension all clubs, are in deep financial trouble, rapidly running out of cash and consequently piling up debt. “Next year,” Brett Gosper, chief executive of World Rugby said, “the money will run out.” This is not because salaries have been too high (though there is a case for saying that some have been higher than can realistically be afforded). It is quite simply because governments have cut off the game’s biggest source of revenue by banning spectators and requiring matches to be played behind closed doors. TV money and sponsorship money cannot in these circumstances be increased. So, the game is being slowly, or perhaps not so slowly, strangled by government decree. If this continues, if the Six Nations in the Spring is still, by government order, to be played without paying spectators, professional rugby will wither. It may not die but it will be bloody sick.

Now everyone recognizes that governments have a duty to protect, or try to protect, people’s health. Likewise, few would deny that coping with Covid-19 is very difficult, and that governments have perforce been inventing their response as they go along. Some of their measures may be wise and necessary; there is reason to doubt other ones, and the banning of spectators from outdoor events is one, the wisdom or necessity of which may be questioned. There is, after all, very little evidence of the extent to which well-attended sporting events in February and March contributed to the surge of the virus in the Spring.

Be that as it may, it is the government, which by the decisions it has made, that has driven rugby and other sports to the verge of insolvency. It has done this to other parts of the economy too, and in some areas, it has stepped in to mitigate the damage done by its policies.

Sport, like the Arts, is not only of economic importance; it also contributes greatly to individual happiness and social well-being. This happiness, this well-being is now stifled by government decisions which are deeply damaging on every level: economically, socially and individually.

What governments have damaged; they have a duty to try to repair. When a dozen years ago, banks, through greed, folly and carelessness, inflicted great damage on the economy, governments invented money to bail them out. They did this on a huge scale.

Now rugby, like other sports, is in dire straits, and unlike the banks in 2008, through no fault of its own. Responsibility for its plight rests with the government and the decisions it has made. Repair of Sport’s balance-sheets should consequently be the responsibility of the government too. The sum required to avert what would be lasting and immediate damage is tiny in the context of public spending. Alternatively, of course, the government could simply lift its ban on spectators. It might then find that the risk this would run has been much exaggerated.