RFU must prioritise return of promotion

IN defeat, defiance.

- NICK CAIN

For supporters of the incumbent RFU administration who voted for the retention of chief executive Bill Sweeney at the Special General Meeting, still believing that the £1.36m LTIP executive bonus scheme was a justified corporate metric in a year in which it posted a £42m loss and sacked 42 staff, here's another metric to chew on.

The one in three clubs who voted no confidence in Sweeney at the SGM on Thursday night at Twickenham would, in the corporate world, have been a shareholders' revolt of sufficient magnitude to have forced him to stand down.

Instead, the Sweeney endorsement by 466 votes to 206, with 36 abstentions, was called "decisive" and "emphatic" by the RFU interim chair Sir Bill Beaumont.

In the process Beaumont, a staunch Sweeney supporter, ignored that in the weird cosmos of a members cooperative like the RFU, apathy, disillusion, and disengagement with the national union is rife evidenced by barely half the 1,300 voting member clubs in English rugby exercising their democratic right to have a say on the future of their union.

On a number of counts it did not come close to being decisive, despite the RFU having every possible logistical, monetary, and staffing advantage. It had the controlling hand of running the SGM, as well as having the funding to not only undertake a six-week country-wide roadshow to make its case, but also commission the City law firm Freshfields to deliver a £100,000 report on the L'TIP with limitations on its scope. In addition, it had the entire RFU communications department at its beck and call. Yet, this was no avalanche.

With very limited resources by comparison, the movement that secured the SGM, and then formed the Whole Game Union, with unpaid volunteers led by Nottingham chairman Alistair Bow, Rugby Football Referees Union secretary Adam White, and Chichester chairman Paddy McAlpine in the vanguard, made their case so effectively that the RFU administration has been brought to book.