Grass roots stirring

This leads me to comment on the continuing discontent in English rugby, with the looming possibility of an SGM calling for the head of CEO, Bill Sweeney.

The problem we have is a lot of people think it’s a case of bad apple – it’s actually a bad barrel.

We need to sort the barrel out – that’s the structure – and allow clubs to believe they’re being heard.

When they’re being represented by a 62-person committee, they don’t feel like they are, don’t feel close to it.

What we need to do is reduce the committee, which holds the executive to account, and make it more accountable to the people who are running the grassroots of the sport – (chairman) Andy (Lynch) and I believe we need to stop calling for people’s heads and look at the structure.

There is a review underway which has been set in place by the Council – we’d have preferred it to be independent rather than instigated by them and a sense they’ll be marking their own homework – but we’d like to see 12 regions, each with a representative onto a national council which represents the members and holds the executive to account.

That way clubs will know who their representative is, and they can lobby directly to them to get change. I think it would make a big difference to the game.

There can be sub-committees for aspects of the sport like refereeing, pro, facilities, laws etc, and people can be invited onto those before feeding into the 12.

In short, we need to get rid of something which is so outdated nobody in their right mind would have designed this structure – the RFU turns over around £200m and we’ve got a 62-person committee in a mutual organisation running it as the game tries to continue becoming more professional. It’s crazy.

https://www.ramsrugby.com/news/programme-notes-from-the-ceo-2896166.html