Rugby union in limbo: ‘Riches at the top and everyone else is starving’

Welcome to The Breakdown, the Guardian’s weekly (and free) rugby union newsletter. Here’s an extract from this week’s edition. To receive the full version every Tuesday, just pop your email in below.

The future tends not to wait for the past to pack its bags. It certainly feels that way in English domestic rugby where the winds of change are once again howling around some creaking old institutions. Ask any club below the Premiership where they see themselves in five years’ time and just about all of them shrug their shoulders and say they are in limbo awaiting some clarity from Twickenham.

Everything is relative, of course, and all connected with the game send their best wishes to Bill Sweeney, the RFU chief executive, who is currently in hospital being treated for a pulmonary embolism. His anticipated absence from work for several weeks, though, comes at a delicate time with increasing disquiet up and down the country among those who cherish the game below the top tier.

The decision not to allow the Championship winners Ealing Trailfinders to be promoted to the Premiership, ostensibly because their stadium does not meet the league’s minimum standards, was merely the latest psychological blow to be felt by every ambitious Championship club. Nor does it help to watch one or two Premiership sides seemingly down tools with several weeks of the competition still to play.

Was Bath’s abject 64-0 defeat at Gloucester on Saturday just a blip or a depressing glimpse of a new Premiership trend? And, for all the breathless action elsewhere, how is a crumbling post-Covid second tier supposed to enhance the development of English-qualified players, coaches and referees? Given adult male participation numbers are falling across the