London Welsh in administration and say they need between £1m and £1.5m a season to operate.


Has the world gone mad I can understand a top level club spending that sort of cash (and more besides) but for a second tier club with no TV revenue coming and gates around the 1,500 mark in it's well OTT.

A mate of mine runs a local rugby union club up here in the North East equivalent to NL2. They pay there players good win bonuses and recruit two or three overseas players on £30000 wages. Their crowds are in the low hundreds. They get money from sponsorship , bar takings and a big fat wadge from the RFU every season.

That figures. I think it was a similar story in Wales pre the Regions but now the clubs at NL2 equivalent level are back to basically amateur status as clubs just could not keep forking out for players contracts/wages.

A good mate of my dad's is a union ref. He's been sent to Singapore, Malaysia, Georgia and many other locations on reffing duty (RFU jollies).
He's adamant that union clubs rely on sponsorship rather than crowds and that clubs attracting a thousand or less can easily survive as long as the sponsorship money is coming in.

I don't know why anyone at all is surprised by the fact that crowds - and the revnues they bring - are not the be all and end all for sports teams.

They're pretty important if you're professional or paying some of your players.

I think the point he's making is that as a percentage of the overall revenue for the year, attendances at that level are peanuts compared to sponsorship and central funding.

If London Welsh pull in 1,500 punters at £10 a head, that's £15,000 every two weeks. I'd guess that's dwarfed by what they receive from other funding sources.

More or less what I said three posts up.

Hadden has left SRU.

Tuesday's Lions game was pretty shocking viewing, thought to be fair, it was played in shocking conditions. The midweek side did look pretty weak though. It doesn't have much bearing for Saturday.

The test side is tba soon. Expect Fitzgerald to be on the wing in place of Monye.

Sean McGuire (former Sainst cheif exec.) was less than impressed with the first test:

"To cut through the absurd post morte masquerading as post match analysis, basically one of their big lads was able to push one of our big lads back in a few scrums with some success. It was as simple as that."

"Similarly the Lions defeat was not the result of some geopolitical, unpredicatble event but a simple lack of skill."

"But that does'nt stop there being faux complex explanations of why a key tactic is kicking the ball back and forth with tedious frequency - most of it without any tactical benefit to anyone - usually until it is dropped or goes into touch."

"RL fans like me can be overly critical of union form time to time, but the one thing we are correct about is our characterisation of RU as kick-and-clap."

"It always reminds me of everything I have read about World War I. A massive struggle, but all for a few yards of no man's land."

He'll have some of the keyboard warrior regulars from here banging on his door as we speak!
How dare he criticise union!

Good of McGuire to write something at a level your average Saints fan might understand.



Test side is out:

Adam Jones for Vickery
Matthew Rees for Mears
Simon Shaw for Alun Wyn Jones
Kearney for the injured Byrne
Fitzgerald for Monye

Simon Shaw? Why?

Get your money on the Boks kicking at least four or five penalties.

Because Simon Shaw is a big nasty man who will provide some physicality in the forwards.

Sadly he's also too stupid to play either within the laws of the game or at least be sly enough not to get caught.

7 Irish, 6 Welsh, 2 English.

where did you find this info pal

[url=http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/rugby_union/8118816.stmThe Beeb[/url

Plus Lee Byrne will take no further part, due to injury.

Shame for Byrne, looked really good in the opening weeks of the tour and his kicking game would have been a weapon at altitude.

Kearney is a good kicker, maybe better than Byrne. The Lions will miss Byrne's running however. I wish Earls was on the bench, he's more dangerous with ball-in-hand than Kearney.

14.00 kick off. The Lions need to win to keep the Series alive. As per. I hope I'm wrong, but I can't see the Lions pulling it off, especially at altitude.

Im so glad sky invented skyplayer i thought i was gonna miss this game.

TIP: dont look after someones house who doesnt have sky sports when there is a big game on

Dirty B'stard....should have been off for that.

3-0 Lions

Lions split em up middle and bit of biff as well

Definate red before the dirty fecker

O`Driscoll is a feisty little git aint he

Try lions......Kearney scores and having a blinder.

Lions all over the boxs like a rash...Jones nails a corker from wrong touchline.

10-0 lions.