Wales

[100%Welsh.II]

There's too many club games. Is it really necessary to play every team home & away? All it does is dilute the need to win all your home games & pinch a few away. It just seems like an excessive way of finding a champion. Soccer players can play 50 games a year with only a broken tailnail or a poofy kick in the shin to complain about, rugby's a bit different, you actually get smashed.

Team Wales needs to be the master by raking in the bucks & flicking it to the clubs who are just an incubator to prep up the next bunch of freakish Welsh talent. Warburton for example shouldn't need to mince around playing 20 club games a year, he should be allowed space to focus on world domination mixing it up with the best in the business, not thrashing himself with the lowly scrappers every week.

We've also gone backwards in extending the Super Rugby season IMO.

All systems can be improved and we need to do a lot concerning marketing the game in Wales. However we also need to tackle the servile nature of some individuals in Wales, or to use a more politically incorrect term the Uncle Toms’ in Welsh society. We have a wonderful product in the Celtic league (Rabo pro 12) yet some people just want to go back to playing English teams and returning back to the old days, as if you could just turn back time and turn the old amateur club system into the professional game. It didn’t work when we first turned professional and it won’t work now, we have the product and we must sell it to the people and not look over the border at the wealthy English clubs.

Central planning, central contracts and government intervention is required. The present system is producing players at the professional level required, but we can’t emulate the English by having club rugby because we simply don’t have the money to expand the franchises. The issue in Wales is not really the professionalism of players or limiting how many games they play. No its why can’t Welsh rugby profit from our present international success. The Cardiff Blues for example moved into the Cardiff City Stadium because they wanted the extra capacity in that stadium to expand but that didn’t happen. Instead we had arguments about staying in the city centre at the old Arms Park ground which is only about 12,000ish capacity at tops, rather than asking the real questions. Questions like how has the marketing teams in all the regions, apart from maybe the Scarlets, failed to improve the fan base of these regions at a time that Wales have won 3 grand slams in 7 years, a semi -final in the world cup and have produced an exciting young international team.


The biggest question is not can we produce good professional rugby players, but how can we get the fans through the gates of the stadiums to watch the regions. At the moment we should have a 'feel good' factor, but these marketing people are unfit for purpose and have failed to connect with the fans. Its not as if they have to search out a new market, we have a massive international fan base so its about connecting these fans to our regions. More work is required connecting these regions with their natural fans, and that is why we must also have a region in the valleys and north Wales but that maybe too much in the present economic climate.