The Rugby Football Union's chief executive Francis Baron acted like Neville Chamberlain this week, waving a piece of paper around, or some 30 of them stapled together, and predicting that English rugby would enjoy peace in its time after a deal had been reached with the leading clubs over the management of top players.
Baron has had a rough time in the media lately, which may have explained his slightly premature celebration. If he may not end up in Chamberlain's position, watching the paper burn in his hands, it does remain to be seen what part he will play in the future running of the professional game in England.
The RFU and Premier Rugby's negotiating team have reached an agreement on how the professional game in England should be run for eight years from the start of the 2008-09 season; the Union's council has approved the deal, which is currently being discussed by the 12 Guinness Premiership clubs who will send delegates to a Premier Rugby board meeting in around two weeks for final approval.
The two sides have been here before. They signed an eight-year long-form agreement back in 2001, but that proved lucrative for lawyers who were able to exploit the many loopholes which lay within it. The deal ended up undermining, rather than assisting, the England head coach even after an extra agreement, the elite player scheme, was signed a few years later.
The long-form agreement was an unworkable mess, riddled with compromise and serving no one. Whether the new contract - which will guarantee the England head coach access to his national squad at fixed points in a season with the RFU's director of elite rugby, Rob Andrew, managing elite players centrally - will end up being binding on both sides remains to be seen.
One of the problems of the long-form agreement was that it was managed by a body called England Rugby Ltd. It was made up of five delegates, all from the RFU and Premier Rugby, with the chairmanship, which did not carry a casting vote, initially rotating. It meant that deadlock resulted when it came to major decisions being debated, and an attempt to break the impasse and hire an independent chairman came to nothing when the first, and only, appointment, John Rennocks, found himself siding with the clubs more often than not.
The RFU took exception to him and Rennocks resigned after less than a year in the chair. Even now, the words rugby, football and union put together are enough to make him break out in a sweat. His departure prompted a vote of no confidence being taken, and passed, on ERL against Baron, who was forced to resign from the body which hardly met thereafter.
The group which will oversee the new agreement, the Professional Rugby Board, is made up differently. The RFU and Premier Rugby will each provide four delegates, the Professional Rugby Players' Association two and First Division Rugby one. The RFU will appoint a chairman.
"We have to make this new agreement work when it is signed," said the Premier Rugby chief executive Mark McCafferty. "Because of what has gone on before, we must not be triumphal but cautious. The proof will be seen a couple of years down the line, but what it gives us, which the previous agreement did not, is the chance to improve the England national side while at the same time ensuring that the Premiership, the most successful club tournament in the world, continues to thrive and grow.
"The new board, unlike PRL, will be focused solely on rugby issues, not governance, finance or the commercial side. Premier Rugby is now responsible for arranging the sponsorship and television deals for the Premiership on our own and we will have an influence on the commercial running of the Heineken Cup. What the agreement with the RFU allows us to do is plan the structure of the game in England for the next five years, so that everyone knows where they stand."
The agreement will contain a financial incentive for clubs to increase the number of England-qualified players they have in their squads amid fears that the Premiership is being swamped by players from overseas at the expense of homegrown talent. "The figures do not bear that out," said McCafferty. "In 1998, 64% of squads were English and that is pretty much the figure now. The RFU would like it to rise to 70-75% and the clubs are not against that. You can see from the signings made this year that the emphasis is on quality, not quantity."
Will the new agreement work or will lawyers continue to thrive at the English game's expense? Will Baron, the clubs' bete noire, remain in charge at the RFU? The clubs regard Andrew, the former Newcastle director of rugby, as the key figure in the agreement process. It is too early to see whether peace has broken out, but it was only a year ago that the two sides were on their way to the High Court.
