Clubhouse chat - Rugby in Yorkshire

When we get out of this mess, will someone please come to the rescue of Yorkshire?

On Friday last week, the final placings in the leagues were confirmed and in the promotion and relegation equations, the Yorkshire clubs did not fare well. Yorkshire Carnegie were relegated from the Championship to National One and Rotherham went down from National One to National Two. These are both teams that have played Premiership rugby.

Along with Rotherham, one of the other two clubs to be relegated from National One were from Yorkshire: Hull Ionians. And Otley, who once rose to what is now the Championship, were relegated from National Two.

Yorkshire remains a rugby heartland. There are more clubs in Yorkshire (125) than in any other county. Yet, somehow, this county has become the land that professional rugby forgot.

Why does this matter? Because if you are a young wannabe professional player, where do you go? Quite a lot go to Bath at the moment. The cream of the crop from West Park, one of the Leeds clubs, have just signed for Warrington to play rugby league instead. It also matters because if you have a strong professional club in the county, it gives the game a shop window. It sells rugby to young boys and girls. Ideally, professional rugby should be spread evenly across the country; Yorkshire has become its big black hole.

The only Yorkshire club left in the top two divisions, now, is Doncaster who finished tenth in the Championship.

For a long while, the hope and expectation was that Yorkshire Carnegie would rebuild and bounce back into the Premiership, but the opposite has happened. The club has gone into freefall. No one can be sure that the club can actually afford to keep going next season.

Indeed, the club has dropped so far that it has changed its name. No longer the “Yorkshire” that had intended to create a county-wide identity, the club has returned to its geographical name: Leeds. Merely changing the name might wipe away some of the toxicity of the recent past.

Here is the problem. Yorkshire has not just been left behind as a county; it’s leading club has become reviled.

This is why. Last season — the 2018-19 season — was one of catastrophic mismanagement. Yorkshire Carnegie (as they were then) were languishing at the foot of the Championship and sought to remedy that situation mid-season by recruiting nine new players, most of them flying in from New Zealand.

However, it soon became clear that the club couldn’t afford their wages. Actually, it could hardly pay anyone’s wages. So the entire staff were laid off — players and non-players — and a deal was agreed where they would receive only 15p of every single £1 they were owed. Some of them didn’t receive that.

Somehow, the RFU cast ethics and player welfare to one side and the club was allowed to continue unimpeded. In August last year, an entire new squad was recruited at cut-price deals. That they were playing their first games a month later made a sequence of heavy defeats inevitable. The total absence of long-term strategy was then exposed, before Christmas, when the new coach who had just recruited this squad was sacked. As if this was all his fault.

When Phil Davies then arrived to take the helm, people asked him: why? Why do it? Davies had coached Leeds for a decade, from 1996-2006, and had just come back from the World Cup where he had coached Namibia. Davies is one of the good guys. When Davies then recruited four of his old Namibian players, it seemed that the whole story was about to repeat itself.

Then the music stopped. Covid-19 brought the whole thing to a halt. Yorkshire Carnegie still hadn’t won a game; they hadn’t come close. The Namibians flew home before the planes stopped flying. Relegation was finally confirmed. And that is where we are now.

Yorkshire/Leeds now have a chance to rethink, to reset. They badly need it. Davies seems to understand that. “This is the end of one era,” he said. “It is time for a new era.” The fact that Davies came back in and held his nose is one reason why “Leeds” now have a chance of making that happen.

Why did he come back? “It was a case of trying to help an old friend,” he explains. His attitude has been to draw a line on the past. “I didn’t make those decisions and I wasn’t there when they were made. Hopefully respect and credibility can return.”

The new Leeds probably need more than just a new name. They should move home as well. There has been talk of shifting to York. Their Emerald Headingley Stadium has a capacity of 21,062, which doesn’t look too good when, sometimes, less than 500 come to watch.

It also costs just less than £100,000 a season for them to play there. They will struggle to afford that. That is why Davies has been putting feelers out to the club’s network of former players to ask them to help.

In another world, where blue-sky thinking is allowed, the RFU could take a commanding stake in the club and run it as a franchise. Imagine having that vast player-base at your command. The RFU has already taken over a shared ownership of the academy (after Yorkshire Carnegie had elected to make the staff redundant).

The reality is that Yorkshire/Leeds have raw materials aplenty to sustain a competitive team. The academy is a proven success, there are two massive universities in the city where sport is a high priority, and a massive network of clubs on the doorstep — all of which makes for an ideal player pathway.

But this is a long-term project. And it needs someone to take it on. Not just Davies alone.

Until then, this remains the county that professional rugby forgot.