Time for the silly season

Real rugby will rear its ugly head this afternoon. OK, some of us seem to have heard about nothing else in recent weeks and even months - and that is since the World Cup - but the Courage Clubs' Championship is about to intrude and, for heaven's sake, people will actually be playing the game instead of talking about it, writes Steve Bale.

For heaven's sake? Thank heavens, more like, though in this first professional (all right, open) season there will be nothing, by Rugby Football Union decree, in the pockets of the humbler club practitioners beyond the expenses, cars, careers, houses etc by which the unlamented amateur regulations were previously observed in the breach.

Peter Brook, one of the RFU's International Rugby Board representatives, advised immediately after the IRB had made its fateful decision in Paris (was that really less than a fortnight ago?) that there would never be a level playing-field, and already that warning has become harsh reality.

By imposing - however worthy the reasons - a one-year moratorium and maintaining the old amateur regulations that are being discarded everywhere else, the RFU has immediately run counter to the spirit of the IRB decision, which was that the new dispensation applied to everyone in the game.

Ben Clarke, the England forward, was on television yesterday questioning the fairness of playing in the Bath team as one of the privileged few who will be paid for their England chores, alongside others whose earning- power has been taken away almost as soon as it was granted.

It's a fair, or rather unfair, point which exposes that, by design, it is not a level playing-field. Neither, for that matter, is it between the England players, who might have imagined they could top up their international earnings of pounds 40,000 by making something at club level, and players in other countries who are under no such restriction.

So, as yet, not much has changed. The England squad's bone of contention with the RFU over several years has been the disparity in attitudes and practice between up here and down under, and the disparity persists. But the members of the Courage League First Division, which will eventually become the business end of the English game, must appreciate that the evil day has been merely deferred and not wiped off the calendar altogether.

In the meantime they had better set about working out how on earth they are going to make the new system work. European rugby is one answer, though this has begun to assume the dubious role of a panacea both in terms of playing standards and generating income. The details of English clubs' involvement next season (Wales and Ireland are participating with France, Italy and Romania in this season's prototype) are a long way from being worked out.

But what is already agreed as Leicester set out in defence of their title is that the domestic championship is inadequate as a support-structure for the England team. Yet it is less than a year since everyone was lyricising about the type of rugby being produced by such disparate clubs as Wasps and Sale and West Hartlepool and even Gloucester and Orrell. That was before England's World Cup misadventure.

Rob Smith, the Wasps coach, has even worked out a plan for the implementation of professional rugby in England - which makes you wonder where the RFU has been all this time. He calculates that a total three-year package involving a notional eight-club First Division, Cup, European Championship and Tests and also involving the Second and Third Divisions would cost pounds 18.75m. This is not funny money.