Lymm RFC v Sheffield Tigers RUFC – Saturday 18th January 2025

Welcome back to Beechwood! I hope that you all had a relaxing and peaceful festive break and that, after our false start last weekend (when our 1st 2025 fixture, like all of the other games in our league, was a victim of the weather) you are looking forward to the 2nd half of our season.

I would also like to extend a very warm welcome to our visitors today, Sheffield Tigers RUFC.

Yardley & District RFC (based in Birmingham) is, in many respects, a typical grassroots club – it can trace its history back to 1954, ran three senior teams and had a flourishing mini and juniors’ section, That is until two seasons ago, when Yardley withdrew from the RFU’s competitive league structure. It had hoped for a return of senior rugby this season but managed to play just one pre-season fixture. All that remains of the Club is its M&J Section, which is great for the children who live in an area ranked 27th in terms of deprivation of Birmingham’s 69 wards, but with no senior teams to feed into, the future of Yardley looks bleak.

The demise of Yardley tells a tale that is being repeated all over the country – that tale is the decline in grassroots rugby. Recent research undertaken by Telegraph Sport revealed that 174 clubs have withdrawn from the RFU’s competition structure over the past 22 years and during that period, only 36 new clubs have entered the system.

Nearer to us, Wakefield is an example of the other reason why, as a sport, we find ourselves in such a precarious position – the failure of professional rugby. Wakefield used to have two Rugby Union clubs, whose alumni include Nigel Melville, Stuart Lancaster and Mike Harrison. But in 2004, following relegation to the third tier of English rugby, Wakefield’s benefactors withdrew their funding, leaving the club with a trading loss of £105,000 for the season and unsecured creditors’ loans of approximately £640,000. In the following year, Wakefield Cougars also closed their doors.

Mike Harrison said of Wakefield’s demise “It is just so sad. There was so much history and tradition tied up in that club, and it was really important to the community. That’s all gone because of money.” Wakefield’s demise has been replicated more recently with the well-publicised failures of Wasps, Worcester, London Irish and Jersey Reds.

Damian Green in the DCMS 2023 report on English Rugby Union said: “Is it possible that the attempt to turn club rugby into a professional game in this country ran before it could walk? Things got too ambitious, and people have spent too much money. Are we trying to support an infrastructure that there just isn’t enough demand for, that there is not enough TV revenue, not enough gate revenue, not enough of all the ancillary revenues to support the kind of institutions we have set up?” The answer to that question is a resounding “yes”.  In 2024, Leonard Curtis (a leading firm of insolvency practitioners) found that, according to the latest available accounts, of the 13 Premiership clubs that started the 2022-23 season, eight of them had negative equity, meaning that they were technically insolvent and being subsidised by their owners.

The RFU has been blamed for the dire position that professional and amateur Rugby Union has found itself in – witness the recent convulsions regarding the call to remove Bill Sweeney as Chief Executive and the resignation in December of Tony Ilube as Chairman of the RFU. In large part, that is true – they are supposed to be the guardians of our sport and have, by any reasonable measure, failed in that regard. But there are other factors in play and the real question is “Where do we go from here?” This is definitely an issue where all I can say at this stage is watch this space!

As to today’s game, I don’t think that the league position of Sheffield Tigers is in any way a true reflection of their ability – of their 14 games, 6 have been lost by 5 points or less, including our 1 point victory when we played at Dore Moor in September. They lost by a point at Leeds Tykes at the beginning of December and ran Sheffield very close in their pre-Christmas derby at Abbeydale Park. I suspect that it may be another tough day at the office for Lymm but we have dug deep when we have had to thus far this season – here’s hoping for more of the same.

All that leaves me to say (as usual) is that I wish all the teams, their coaches and support staff, who represent Lymm at every level, from Minis & Juniors up to Senior Rugby the best of luck this weekend.