Tempers were fraying on both sides of the Channel last night as England's biggest club piled in behind France's leading teams and blamed the latest crisis in European rugby squarely on the Rugby Football Union. The threat of a French boycott of next season's Heineken Cup may contain a whiff of brinkmanship but Leicester, among others, insist the real agents provocateurs are lurking within Twickenham.
It may seem incomprehensible to casual onlookers that a dispute which seems to revolve around the self-interest of a few French clubs is, in fact, the RFU's fault. The doubters should listen to the Tigers' chief executive, Peter Wheeler, and the French league president, Serge Blanco, both former captains of their respective countries. Both believe the problem can be solved in minutes if the RFU are so minded.
Wheeler, in particular, remains suspicious of the union's current motives despite the fact he retains a seat on the RFU management board. He sees a clear link between the RFU's failure to sign a new European participation agreement to replace the soon-to-expire Paris Accord and the uncertainty over the English domestic game beyond 2009, when the legally binding long-form agreement between the union and elite clubs is due to expire.
Neither has the weekend publication of a leaked blueprint, widely seen as a clumsy attempt at predicting how the club game might look in the event of a schism within English rugby, done anything to promote trust. "As I understand it the RFU is not prepared to sign the new [European] agreement everyone else has agreed to," said Wheeler yesterday. "That's basically because they want to keep control of who goes into the competition when the long-form agreement runs out in 2009.
"It should be pretty simple for them, if they were being genuine, to agree that anybody going into European competition from 2009 onwards has to be a member of Premier Rugby Ltd, as is currently the case. I'm not sure what they expect us to do. Do they want us to play in the competition for the next couple of years, build it up and then be excluded? That seems to be the crux of the matter. Unless they want to nominate someone else to play in Europe, it should be quite easy either to sign up or give us assurances."
In other words, the concerns of the French and English clubs over the relatively paltry financial rewards for participating in the Heineken Cup are no longer the main issue. According to Wheeler and Blanco, the RFU had been on the brink of joining the French and agreeing to give their clubs a 50% stake in the union-run European Rugby Cup Ltd. "If the RFU had accepted to give 50% of their stake to the clubs, we would have taken part," confirmed Blanco.
Instead the French clubs have seen an opportunity to soothe their own trickiest problem, namely the fixture congestion next season when the World Cup will cut across their beloved domestic championship. They can also argue they are merely following the precedent set by the English. The 1998-99 tournament went ahead without any English sides as a consequence of another ruinous political ruck between the Premiership clubs and the RFU. The damage to next season's event will be even greater if Toulouse, Stade Français, Biarritz and Perpignan are not involved.
There is equally little doubt the English clubs would have supported their French confreres and also withdrawn if they could have feasibly done so. Under the terms of the oft-cited long-form agreement, however, they must fulfil fixtures in RFU-sanctioned competitions for the next two seasons and can only express their solidarity from afar.
Sources at the European Rugby Cup headquarters in Dublin also say they feel trapped in the middle of someone else's argument but the smart money still remains on a French u-turn. Representatives from the English clubs and the RFU are due to meet again tomorrow while ERC's next shareholder meeting is on February 6. It would be a terrible shame if a vibrant tournament is ruined by a combination of Anglo-Saxon politicking and Gallic indifference.
