Rugby Union: League players can return

One hundred years and one month after rugby league made its own break for freedom, rugby union's International Board yesterday made the historic announcement of an immediate free gangway for rugby league players, hitherto barred as professionals and pariahs, to enter or re-enter union.

The return of players of the outstanding quality of the Welsh stand-off Jonathan Davies is now dependent only on the contractual arrangements they have in league. Note Davies's nationality: the IB, meeting in Tokyo to ratify the demise of amateurism agreed in Paris in August, gave individual unions the let-out of regulating the gangway as they each saw fit.

And already the Rugby Football Union has made clear its desire to enforce a stand-down period for would-be converts in England - even though its own president admits such a restriction would contravene the law relating to restraint of trade.

The Welsh, by contrast, know when they are on to a good thing and when Vernon Pugh, chairman of the IRB amateurism committee and the Welsh Rugby Union, arrived at Heathrow airport last night he had no doubt his union would welcome any and all of its northern exiles. "We haven't discussed it but I would be surprised if we decided on any restriction," he said.

Pugh is the driving force behind the abandonment of years of shamateurism and the embracing of professionalism under the catch-all description of "open" rugby. Once the decision to permit payment for playing had been taken in principle, the century-old ban on rugby league professionals was no longer tenable.

So is the English position and, bizarrely, the RFU appears to know it. "We would still favour a period of stand-down or requalification," Bill Bishop, the union's president, said yesterday. England's delegates in Tokyo had pushed for a six-month stand-down.

"We have varying points of view and Rugby Union officials in Cumbria, Yorkshire and Lancashire feel very strongly about the effects of player- loss to RL. We will be discussing the matter at our executive committee next week aware that, if we imposed a period of suspension and it were tested in the courts, we would lose.

"But we do have a four-month qualification spell for players moving from one club to another and a six-month spell for players coming from abroad. It would be illogical to sideline a player moving from Orrell to Bath for four months but allow a player moving from Wigan RL to Bath instant access."

Quite so. Doubtless Tony Hallett, the secretary, will explain the RFU's curious reasoning when he conducts a press briefing at Twickenham today. Anyway, he too has already admitted that even the 120-day qualification imposed on transferred players would not stand up legally.

Otherwise the board concerned itself with the regulation of professional rugby, in particular asserting the primacy of national unions over clubs or other bodies in contracts, sponsorship, advertising and broadcasting rights. Players' contracts with clubs, for instance, will need the approval of their national union.

Richards' poor example,

Carling's sidestep, page 25