Rams deducted 5 points

I know it's after the horse has bolted , but we now screen shot anything important regarding GMS. It is not to be trusted!!

Clive,

Big Eddie wrote: Clive, the RFU are an incompetent organisation and seem to operate non of the values they espouse. It is an absolute disgrace that they can operate such double standards and penalise your club and an unpaid volunteer in the way that they have. I bet non of the fat cats at the RFU have any idea of the effort and money that unpaid volunteers put into community clubs..................why would they know........they never look beyond elite rugby and the Premiership.

Eddie, thanks for your continued support, look forward to visiting Caldy next season ...

The judgement is quite clever really, the panel have found that our volunteer is completely blameless but the executive are to blame ... but those of us at the club know that the said volunteer has handled all player registration issues without any incident for the last 10 years and knows far more about player registration administration side than any of the committee (and at times London Irish!), so when said volunteer puts a document in front of them, they would have been trusting her judgement totally .... it is what it is and we move on ... as a club we always thought that Richmond were tremendously hard done by and didn't deserve not to be in The Championship, but any lingering hope we had (and it was very, very, very small) of getting promoted went out the window on Wednesday morning ....

Edited by Shamrose - 02 Mar 2020 at 13:54

That what I thought but it was the Holiday Inn Bloomsbury, so probably not bad

The RFU’s “sledgehammer to crack a nut” approach to disciplinary matters, in terms of the resources consumed by them has always seemed odd to me. As others have noted they appear to be totally disproportionate to the “misdemeanour”. On reading the posts above it doesn’t seem that they make any attempt to differentiate between the duty of care/responsibility the RAMS board have regarding a simple administrative error and that of the board of a PLC when truly important decisions and actions are taken. This lack of empathy can only lead to excessive costs on all sides.

Edited by The Joy of (Level) 7 - 02 Mar 2020 at 17:16

The Joy of (Level) 7 wrote: The RFU’s “sledgehammer to crack a nut” approach to disciplinary matters, in terms of the resources consumed by them has always seemed odd to me. As others have noted they appear to be totally disproportionate to the “misdemeanour”. On reading the posts above it doesn’t seem that they make any attempt to differentiate between the duty of care/responsibility the RAMS board have regarding a simple administrative error and that of the board of a PLC when truly important decisions and actions are taken. This lack of empathy can only lead to excessive costs on all sides. Why doesn’t someone write to them asking why they feel the need to take this approach and to be so over-represented legally, and at the same time how much it has cost them in the last financial year?

Because that is how they approach the clubs full stop. They DO NOT differentiate between a Premiership Club and a Level 12 club, you're a club/business, then your Executive should act accordingly.

The costs to them are not up for debate, it's about winning and it's about clubs acting in a certain way when in breach of RFU regulations, however, the same is not applied to the RFU because they can never breach any regulations (except World Rugby).

The Management Board can act domestically in a cavalier/fiscally outrageous/do as we say, not as we do manner and no one holds them to account and if you tried to, I would suggest you win the lottery before you did.

To give you one more example of the arrogance in which they behave and then you might see why I write like I do ....

In 1999 with the RFU worried that the clubs might break away and form their own league, in effect, leaving the RFU with no top quality players to choose from, the Elite referees at the time were asked to sign a contract of employment. It was made clear that not to sign would restrict our ability to referee Premiership rugby. We all duly signed. The contract was totally over the top, as it was written for England players, so 95% of it did not apply to referees bu hey ho, we signed and in a stroke, the RFU nipped in the bud any chance of a breakaway, no officials, no game.

Fast forward to about 2006, the payment of referees was now in full swing, you were paid a match fee, travelling expenses, overnight stay when required etc etc ... however, of the referees from 1999 who had signed then, only one remained, yours truly. To cut a long story short, it came to light that the 1999 contract differed quite financially significantly to the one of 2006 but it seemed no one in the RFU had remembered and my colleagues started to complain that they were earning less than yours truly ...

1) First of all the RFU didn't believe I'd signed a contract in 1999, they had no record of it in the HR department
2) I produced the contract
3) They tried to claim it wasn't a contract because no one from the RFU had signed it ... oh come on guys, do any of you know nothing about contracts of employment, you're the RFU for gods sake (of course they did, they were just trying it on, as they always do if they can get away with it)
4) Having accepted the contract was legally binding, they offered me the new one, which was very similar in financial remuneration but not exactly the same and had a potential of earning £2000 less a year (a bonus paid for your ranking position)
5) I refused to sign it
6) After a period of about 2 months where there was a stand off, I received the following phone call one night from my referee manager ..."this is not coming from me, it's coming from the very top, you need to sign the new contract, and if you don't sign in 7 days, I've been told not to appoint you to any more Premiership games until you do"
Me "that's constructive dismissal, you can't do that"
Manager "I'm just the messenger and I'm not happy having to have this conversation" ....

Subsequently, I signed the new contract 5 days later .... I would easily have won an industrial tribunal claim, as a high ranking Council Member told me about 6 years ago and I knew that anyway and if I had done that, the RFU would never have let me near a Premiership ground again, because analysis of refereeing is very subjective, they could have used lack of performance as an excuse (as they've done with two previous FULL time referees) and I couldn't have challenged it ..... and they so don't like people who aren't "yes" men! ....

As I've said previously, you NEVER BEAT the RFU, you win small battles along the way but they always win the war ....

I'm so sorry to be reading all this, there've been so many cases of this at various levels below the top one, and the RFU give you FA help/guidance ahead of charging you with whatever offence, which you hardly ever win. And top level offenders with paid staff are treated no differently, and that's supposedly fair...