iffleyox

Is it December already? Have I been in a coma? This sort of thing usually waits to the closed season.

Agree - though arguably it should have done given three RU premiership clubs went under in quick succession in three different ways (demonstrating therefore multiple ways to get it wrong): Wasps - living beyond their means Worcester - delinquent (at best) owners London Irish - long term backer pulling out *if* the RFU took concrete steps to prevent any of that from being able to happen again then regulators in every other sport wouldn’t have to do anything other than copy and paste. As it is, there’s nothing there that wouldn’t be recognised this side of the fence.

Exactly - and as predicted certainly by me and I think I remember a few other on here the week after it happened - assuming you’re right the charge isn’t for ‘fielding a weakened team’, it’s for ‘disrepute’, which is a brush about as broad as a governing body needs it to be at the time they’re using it.

This comes up regular as clockwork. Though if I was a massive horse racing fan, I might be a bit more miffed about the treatment of Britain’s most attended sport after football…

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Would they have space to fall over?

Decent on and off pitch management and lots of money? The former paid for by the latter and generating more of the latter… it’s completely replicable. All a club needs is the personnel and the cash. see also Wakefield.

*All* at the start of your second sentence is doing an awful lot of heavy lifting though. Especially when implicit but left untyped is ‘and deep pockets which they have a hitherto untapped desire to empty in the direction of a rugby league club’

Except Bristol Sport - Bristol City, Bristol RU and Bristol Highfliers basketball. admittedly that’s only been going as a group since 2012 so there’s maybe one generation there that thinks it’s normal now, but the idea was to explicitly copy Barcelona.

Some people play down to their surroundings I guess. Weird phenomenon, but it happens.

Do you know, exactly this was running through my head?

You…

A small town a long way from the M62? Hardly the centre of the universe compared with Leeds…

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Wesfarmers/Bunnings famously recently did. Cost them $1bnAUS it’s not like we don’t have hilarious recent examples of largeAustralian operations thinking they can come to the UK and do *exactly* that… we in the UK might stop having that expectation when a bit more water has gone under the bridge since the last time it was tried.