Alan Watkins: Whether the trap door will open adds to relegation excitement

One of the characteristics of modern rugby is the disinclination, in England at any rate, to allow the season to come to a graceful end. Thus: England won the Six Nations' Championship and the Grand Slam fair and square. Gloucester won the Powergen Cup in great style. The Heineken European Cup final is still to come with no English (or, for that matter, Scottish or Welsh) clubs in the last four.

Still we are not satisfied, or so it seems. There are to be play-offs for the Zurich Premiership championship. For myself, I am in the happy position of being able to treat this contrived competition with what the late George Brown once called a complete ignoral. It has been fabricated for unashamedly mercenary reasons. Others are not so fortunate. The sports pages will have to cover it and they will have to write about it because, like the universe, it exists.

Why it should exist at all – apart from the commercial considerations which I have just mentioned – is another question. Most sports work best with a league or leagues and one domestic knock-out competition. In football, the Worthington Cup and in cricket, the plethora of limited-over competitions have not added to the glory of either game. In rugby a knock-out competition is being tacked on to a league. It does not make sense; except, as I say, to generate cash.

At the moment, Gloucester look like winning the Premiership as they did the Powergen Cup. They may be overtaken by another club but that does not appear very probable. Even so, this should provide excitement enough for any normal person. But apparently not.

The bottom of the table, by contrast, genuinely is exciting. It is not just a matter of whether Bath, Bristol, London Irish or whoever it may be go down to National League One to join such other powers of the past as Bedford, Coventry and London Welsh. It is, rather, whether the trap door is opened at all, and the premier division is preserved with the present 12 clubs, or supplemented by Rotherham or, conceivably, by both Rotherham and Worcester.

If the last solution is adopted, London Scottish and Richmond – cynically killed off by assorted Mr Moneybags led by Tom Walkinshaw of Gloucester – will have died in vain because the top division will have reverted to 14 clubs. If it is the former solution, with Rotherham once again denied access to the special area with free drinks enclosed by the decorative red ropes, it will look once again like a fiddle.

The trouble is that, as I understand the position, the Rugby Football Union has given its word that this season, there will be promotion and relegation with one club going up and the other down. At the time the promise was made, I applauded. I felt that Rotherham had been defrauded.

What was surprising was not so much the pretext – the state of the club's ground, for all the world as if they intended to stage internationals there – as the meek and compliant spirit in which the club took their rejection. But this has already been and may still be the subject of legal action with allegations that money winged its way in Rotherham's direction; so, as the lawyers are always on the prowl, resting neither by night nor by day, I must be careful what I say.

I am further inhibited because I am not so convinced as I used to be that promotion and relegation are a good thing. Rob Andrew wrote a long report a few years ago in which he recommended that the first or premier division (whatever it was called) should be ring-fenced. This was not because he wished to protect Newcastle who were then riding high in the charts, but because he had arrived at the conclusion that protectionism, so to speak, was the best policy for rugby.

Andrew wrote this in the brave days of Sir John Hall. He has long departed the scene, as I predicted he would. The entrepreneurial knight became bored with what used to be called the handling code. But even without an ambitious fat-cat around the house, the prospect of relegation creates horrible difficulties for players, coaches, managers, directors of rugby, or whatever (I do wish the game would adopt a uniform system of nomenclature).

The position of Jonny Wilkinson is a case in point. On Sunday he seems, through his kicking, to have saved Newcastle from the drop. He says that if he had not, he would still have stayed with the club. I am sure Wilkinson meant what he said at the time. However, I am not so sure that in this wicked world, this is what would have happened.

For one thing, Leicester are badly in need of a good outside-half. And, for another, Clive Woodward, the England manager, has been consistent in selecting his senior squads from the premier division alone. He would not have dropped Wilkinson. But I am reasonably certain that he would have told him that if he wished to secure his future, he would have to be playing in the premier division. And this leaves several players from Bath who must also be worried men.