Wasps Statement

And have they asked Wasps FC? I know some people think what LW did was heinous and not in the spirit of taking their punishment but it's a completely different situation.

Aside from the legal separation, LW was always an 'all of one club' operation - where the weekly email to supporters covered the doings of the Occies, Dragons, Druids, M&Js just as much as the 1st XV. Until the three year Oxford 'adventure' they were all playing out of the same clubhouse and on the same pitch. Even during the sojourn in Oxford it was pretty much the same faces at all the matches of all the sides, and on the committees in the clubhouse.

So, when LW 1st XV imploded they did go 'home' to lick their wounds and tbh it made complete sense for the operation to just make the amateurs the first XV and go again - there was no real sense of them being separate clubs anyway, except legally - and that legal separation in hindsight was a great move.

Wasps, on the other hand, have really nothing AIUI more than the most vestigial links with the amateur set-up and those are links of sentiment, rather than because there's any training or anything like that going on at Twyford Avenue. So it really would be a cynical takeover of another club, and more importantly a takeover that said club would have to be on board with, as they're perfectly entitled to say no. FWIW the general temperature from Wasps supporting friends is that Wasps FC are quite happy as they are and wouldn't go for it (see also Worcester FC).

LW on the other hand were a real genuine family of clubs - not clubs that happened to share a name and somehow both claim the same history.

I could have boiled it down to:

LW = 'bad luck boys, welcome back to ODP, been a shame waving you off to matches every week for the last three years, and it was always a bit silly, but you're us and we're you - we're all back where we belong and we'll work something out'

Wasps = 'oh, we've gone bust, where's the telephone?- hello, Wasps FC? Thirty years ago we used to be you, so we want your league place, thanks in advance'

I know whereof I speak - huge soft spot for LW. 

Grew up a Moseley fan, moved away, drifted away from rugby. LW pitching up in Oxford got me back into watching rugby regularly again, and helped me find my way back to Moseley where I belong. 

I think I've said before on here that I'd never been to Mose since the Reddings, and then went to Mose away with LW, in the Championship season between the two premiership ones, and I walked into the clubhouse on the Common, saw the pictures on the walls, the Internationals board, the cartoon of Sam Doble in his record breaking points year, and a thought hit me like a Proustian train - 

'Oh god, I'm supporting the wrong side.' 

Prodigal son stuff.

So I received those LW weekly emails for three years!

You don't have to formally take them over, just pump money into them to buy better players etc. 

I don't know why you've got such an issue with what happened at London Welsh.  The Amateurs were already playing at L9, and they were very much a part of the club, the same at the Women, Occies, M&J - we truly are one big happy family.  So when the pro team went out of existence, the Amateurs became the most senior team within the club, and effectively inherited the mantle of '1st XV'.  That meant we rebuilt from L9 - one level higher than the bottom of the pyramid.  The way you bang on about it, you'd think we'd taken over a L5 team and moved them into ODP just to save ourselves five years of travelling around public parks with dog mess for goalposts.

Speaking as an outsider - LW has always come across as one club. Other clubs spout that as a mantra all the time but don’t mean it. Their renaissance has been exemplary.

On the subject of ODP I’d like to string up the Park committee that thought it best to leave there in 1956 to leasing a single pitch from a golf club. If nothing else it shows that terrible decisions are nothing new in rugby club governance. 

The merry go round of London club grounds. Roehampton (I always think Tennis, rather than Golf) was described as the "finest ground in London" when you moved, so you were up scaling, where as London Welsh were expanding from one pitch at Herne Hill to two at ODP.