Direction of travel

Sorry, it was the fact that Penzance & Newlyn are Cornish Pirates that led me to believe you were talking about another club that had played in the old National One and dropped out of the national leagues.

Mounts Bay were a separate club and had no connection with either Cornish Pirates or Penzance& Newlyn RFC, other than an arms length agreement to use the Mennaye pitch for home fixtures. This agreement did not include use of the Pirates’ clubhouse.

They played in what was Level 3(I can’t remember what that league was then called 😒) before their funder encountered enormous business and family problems, and the entity fell apart.

I remember watching them at Waterloo.

Governing philosophy after the Ashley Levett catastrophe in 1999 has been to go as far as a professionally-run amateur team can go. Turns out this was Level 2 and we might have stayed there a bit longer were it not from some serious gaming of DR rules by first H***pury and later London S******h - and utterly disgraceful behaviour by Yorkshire Carnegie which I am sure many here remember.

Our view now is we are really enjoying life in Nat 1. The rugby is excellent, the opposition teams are more like us and we don't have to turn out (often) against a Premiership 2ndXV/Academy side who bear no relation to what the club in question could produce if they didn't have that kind of relationship. We have really enjoyed the hospitality around the league and the visits of other clubs to the RAG.

Tier 2 is such a mess and the financing of it so poor that the club is currently thinking about what might happen. Having taken several seasons to reach Tier 2 from Tier 3 on our long march back from the bottom, and then several more at that level, we know what we have faced before. But things look different now. The realistic figure of money from the RFU at Tier 2 is £83,000 (that much-mentioned £133,000 excludes the cost of insurance which the RFU itself seems to be negotiating and not very well at that).

That sum is not enough to pay for the additional criteria for playing at Tier 2 and so we would have to make a financial decision. When we went up in 2016, the funding was about £650,000 so given we pay players only a match fee with small win bonus, we could afford the added costs of minimum criteria. Now, those criteria are tighter and the funding has almost disappeared. In spring 2016, the club collectively decided to let the players decide if they wanted to go up; of course they did.

Now, it is by no means a given that if - a very big if given the form of several other clubs in Nat 1 - we won the league, we would go up. A lot would depend on whether it evolved into a league in which clubs in the lower half were expected to behave like zombies on behalf of Prem clubs. I do not believe Richmond would go up into a league where we were required to play a minimum number of DRs from the league above. But that is all speculative. 

Richmond spent 4 seasons (08-12) in Tier 4 "National League 2 South". I remember that fondly too. The crunch play-off game v Caldy 2011-12 was one of the hardest and most exciting games I have seen at any level. So, honestly, to answer the question, if the choice was between going up to 2 or down to 4, I would pick the latter.