RugbyRebels

Mellsblue wrote: ↑Sat Jan 07, 2023 6:13 pm
Newly promoted, part-time, second bottom of the table best fully professional top of the table Ealing.

Hell of a result. Did Ealing rotate heavily or something, or was it just a phenomenal effort?

Puja

I don’t know that much about their squad but it doesn’t seem that they rotated. Some ‘big’ names selected, eg Jonah Holmes.

The kids in the background is the best bit!

That is one hell of a pass to win it! What great scenes there.

Puja

An insight into life in The Champ plus my favourite photo from the article. Caldy maybe the new boys but a lot of what is says here rings true for Bedford.

Caldy RFC: Meet the Championship giant-killers on £100-a-match
This is a team where rugby’s true spirit can be found – and despite a recent win against Ealing Trailfinders, they have no grand plans to reach the Premiership

Elgan Alderman
Friday January 13 2023, 3.00pm, The Times
The events of last Saturday at Paton Field, on Telegraph Road in Thurstaston on the Wirral, were not supposed to happen. Ealing Trailfinders, full-time professionals kept out of the Gallagher Premiership because their stadium does not have enough seats, were unbeaten in the Championship. Their hosts, Caldy, had lost eight of ten in their first season at this level. Roger Flashman, the club secretary and in-house historian, reckoned they would do well to keep the defeat to below 70, and several of the home players thought their sober plans for dry January were intact.

January turned wet when the final whistle went. Part-time Caldy had won 26-24. Even after Ealing lost Ross Kane, the tight-head prop, to a red card in the first half, they led by 17 points around the hour mark. But by the final play, Ealing were down to 12 men after Luke Daniels and Jonah Holmes were yellow-carded, and from a scrum five metres out, Louis Beer fielded a huge pass to complete his hat-trick and win the game.

Caldy’s players jokingly rued that they had missed the deadline to apply for minimum standards criteria for promotion to the Premiership, a status only Ealing and Doncaster Knights seek. Caldy are good enough on field to be in the second tier, to shock the champions-elect, but the land outside the playing area is firmly grassroots, home to first-time juniors and lifetime seniors. Facilities are primitive, in the words of a club official, and the crowd of 1,150 who attended on Saturday huddled mainly on a grass bank or under a temporary marquee. Some were lucky to have a seat on one of the 23 park benches on the sloped viewing area. Here what rugby was collides with what it is.

This is not to criticise Caldy for lacking a shiny stadium — they are loving Championship life, even if they do not have blueprints to dominate English rugby — nor to lambast the Premiership for seeking financial stability. “The Championship is the highest level of the game in England to which an ambitious rugby club can realistically aspire,” wrote Gary Devaney, the Caldy chairman, in September. Ealing, backed by the wealth of Sir Mike Gooley, are making a financial play for the top flight and Caldy hope they get there (not least because an Ealing promotion would mean no Championship relegation this season). “We’ve got no delusions of grandeur,” Flashman, 78, says.

Three days after Caldy’s famous win, they welcome The Times to Paton Field. On a Tuesday afternoon, veteran volunteers — dubbed the “Last of the Summer Wine” crew — are here, tending to pitch markings and making sure there is chopped wood for the fire. Eight have turned up today: I encounter John Wylie first, wiping the pitch allocation board clean, then Flashman. He made his debut for Caldy in 1962 and has filled most roles here, including a stint overseeing entertainment as “Flash Rogers” with his sidekick “Dave the Rave”.

The club was founded in 1924 as Old Caldeians, but it was New Brighton, Birkenhead Park and Waterloo who had greater esteem in the 20th century. In recent years, Caldy have risen to new heights: a second spell in National League 1 ended with a historic promotion to the Championship, sealed by a 13-9 win at home to Sale FC on April 23 last year, in front of a crowd of 3,023.

Paton Field hosts Caldy Sports Club — cricket, hockey and rugby — with a pavilion built in 1928. “It’s still wooden and it’s still rotting,” Flashman says. “One day it’s going to fall down, but we’ll see what happens. We have got plans.” He was preparing for Friday’s Championship medical audit when The Times visited. “They said, ‘We’re coming up at one o’clock, can you make sure that we have access to every room in your stadium?’ I said, ‘Yeah, we’ll probably open the front door and that’s about it.’ ”

The club’s plans are not to turn Paton Field into a mighty stadium fit for Premiership standards, nor even to lift the clubhouse skyward, merely vital updates such as women’s changing rooms. There is a council impasse — National Trust, green belt and all that. There has, however, been a breakthrough in the application for an extended premises licence, despite resident concerns over noise and drunkenness at a club nicknamed “The Ravers”.

The off-season was spent preparing for Championship rugby: installing a ramp for stretcher access, swapping the referee and physio rooms, replacing floodlights, sorting ambulances and doctors for match days, erecting a fence on the far touchline that encroaches on the cricket outfield. “Being in the Championship is a lot more expensive than playing in the National Leagues,” Devaney wrote at the start of the season. “We receive £143,000 [in funding] but must spend over £100,000 on medical costs and insurance, plus much-increased travel costs to the likes of Jersey and Cornish Pirates.”


This week’s Tuesday-night training takes place on the artificial pitch at Chester RUFC. While Wirral RUFC train in one half, Caldy’s first and second teams have a combined session on the other side. (On the same day as the Ealing win, the seconds took 22 players to Burnage, who had only eight, splitting the difference for 15 on 15.)

There are two sessions a week for Caldy’s players, supplemented last week by a Monday-night review over Zoom, with a team meal and beer on Thursday nights. The bar manager is full time but everyone else has a day job, and a notice on the club website offers £50 for training and £100 for match days. Gareth Davies, the director of rugby, is a solicitor; Matt Cairns, the head coach who won one cap for England in 2007, is a financial adviser; and JJ Dickinson, the captain, is a PE teacher in Oswestry.

Dickinson joined Caldy aged 12 and has been involved for more than 20 years. About a third of the first team has come up through the juniors, and the club tend to focus on local players (promotion to the Championship brings plenty of interest from agents). “Trying to establish a Championship club on the Wirral [is our goal],” Cairns says. “Without losing the ethos of what we’ve done in terms of how we do things, we don’t need to go full time to hopefully do that.”

The Championship’s standing is a source of frustration for the trio. Reduced funding from the RFU — more than £500,000 per club in the late 2010s, now significantly less — is an easy stick with which to beat the governing body. “I don’t want to insult it but it’s a bit of a nothing league, isn’t it?” Dickinson says. “Especially after last year’s news when Ealing won the league and weren’t allowed to go up. It’s hard to see what the actual attraction to winning the league is, apart from a bit of pride.

“You win the Championship, where do you go from there? What is the attraction for people to put more money into rugby?”

The win over Ealing, with the last-play try and joyous celebrations from youngsters behind the posts, brought rare glare on the league. Beer received messages from players he knows in the Premiership, the level to which he aspires. Davies was listening to a podcast which made light of the fact they were talking about the Championship — “which we don’t talk about” — and that they did not know where Caldy was.


For Cairns, jeopardy at the top is vital. He is dead against ringfencing. “For me that’s crazy, because it just closes off the top game from everyone else,” he says. “The whole thing about sport in this country is about pyramid and that aspiration and wanting to get to the top. I think that’s why people go and watch games because it’s accessible for everyone.”

Recent Covid-affected years have been difficult for the Premiership and Championship. Saracens were relegated for salary-cap breaches in 2019-20, and Wasps and Worcester Warriors went into administration this season, with the former set to respawn in the 2023-24 Championship. There have been plans for a 14-team top flight, but Andrea Pinchen, the Leicester Tigers chief executive, this week said clubs were discussing a 10-team league, and that increased investment in the Championship “would have to be looked at” if so.

That is the no-man’s land in which clubs such as Caldy find themselves: delight at where they are, but where could they go next and what risks would they have to take to get there? “The plan was to stay in the league and the plan still is to stay in the league,” Davies says. Richmond are up next, a 2pm Saturday kick-off at Paton Field, ninth meets tenth. Another chance to muddy troubled waters.

They won. Pretty similar scenario to my own club. We have a chance at the champ, but there is tons and tons of daily unpaid effort to just stay alive

Love the Caldy story. At what point does commonsense come into the equation and one of Wuss or Wasps P Share just get given to the Championship for those funds to be spread amongst the teams? Surely that is the easiest way to increase finance in the league.

FKAS wrote: ↑Wed Jan 18, 2023 10:19 am Love the Caldy story. At what point does commonsense come into the equation and one of Wuss or Wasps P Share just get given to the Championship for those funds to be spread amongst the teams? Surely that is the easiest way to increase finance in the league.

The whole thing needs restructuring rather than a bodged patch job like that. I'm hoping that's included in this putative big relaunch of the Premiership in 2024.

Puja

Puja wrote: ↑Wed Jan 18, 2023 10:27 amThe whole thing needs restructuring rather than a bodged patch job like that. I'm hoping that's included in this putative big relaunch of the Premiership in 2024.

It's the hope that kills ya

Ealing Trailfinders ready to sue RFU if promotion is blocked again

GARRY BOWDEN/SHUTTERSTOCK/REX FEATURES
Alex Lowe, Rugby Correspondent

Ealing Trailfinders are prepared to take legal action against the RFU if they win the Championship and are blocked from being promoted to the Gallagher Premiership for the second year running.

The west London club are top of the RFU Championship and favourites to win the title. They were denied promotion at the end of last season after falling short of the RFU’s minimum standards requirements because their stadium, Vallis Way, did not hold 10,000 supporters.

Ealing Trailfinders, who average about 1,000 spectators for every home game, dropped their appeal against that decision but believe that they can prove the stadium capacity demands are an unlawful barrier to entry.

The minimum standards for this season were redrawn. Any club who wants to go up must now provide evidence within two weeks of winning promotion into a 12-team Premiership that they will have a 10,000-capacity stadium by the 2024-25 campaign.

At the same time, Premiership Rugby (PRL) and the RFU are working on a plan to relaunch professional club rugby. The favoured model at present is to reduce the Premiership to ten teams in 2024, just at the point when Ealing Trailfinders need to open their new stadium.


In effect, the club are being asked to commit to a £14.8 million stadium construction project without any clarity from PRL about what the league would look like in 2024 and whether they would be in it.

Ealing Trailfinders say that level of blind financial commitment could push a debt-free club into the red and questioned PRL’s approach, given its publicised commitment to sustainability in the wake of Wasps and Worcester Warriors going into administration.

Officials at Ealing Trailfinders say they are anxious to avoid the legal route but feel that they are being treated like a “problem child” by the governing bodies, when all they want is clarity on the future and to be part of the restructuring conversation.

“We believe we can prove that 10,000 is unlawful and we feel we have a very good case,” Ben Ward, the Ealing Trailfinders director of rugby, said.

“Why can we host men’s Premiership football here? We can have Man United come down here. We had a licence to be the London Broncos’ base in Super League. So we can do all of those but for some reason we can’t do men’s Premiership rugby. You can’t tell me that’s for any other reason than to be a barrier of trade or restriction of trade.

“We don’t want to use that [legal route]. I don’t believe we should be arguing with our union. I believe we should be working together for what’s right for the game. I would have the same interest if Jersey Reds won the league.

“All we want is good conversations. At the moment we believe it is illogical, illegal and unfair the way they are looking at it. Last year I was getting messages from the RFU saying one thing and PRL telling us something completely different.

“There is no clarity. They are making decisions to protect the 11 [existing Premiership clubs] as it is at the moment.”

Simon Halliday, the former chairman of European club rugby, has been recruited by Ealing Trailfinders to try to bring the RFU and PRL to the table.

“We are not expecting to be told that we can’t go up if we finish top,” Halliday said. “In a very friendly and direct way we have said, ‘We have significant legal opinion.’ We want to know what we are getting into. We want to know what plan they have.

“We want to be part of a sensible and sustainable restructuring of English rugby and be at the table, because what happens to us will drive sentiment in the game.

“If we finish top again and we don’t go up again, we have already put the RFU on notice that we do not intend that to be the outcome. I don’t believe the game will accept it. What does that mean to ambition in this country? Are we just kissing goodbye to the top 11 clubs in the country?”

Ealing are desperate to achieve their long-held ambition of winning promotion. But promotion into what? Simon Massie-Taylor, PRL’s chief executive, has said that a decision on the competition size and structure for the 2024-25 season has to be made as a matter of urgency so that Ealing Trailfinders and other promotion hopefuls know where they stand.

The Premiership’s finances were branded as “clearly unsustainable” in a parliamentary report published by the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport on Tuesday (DCMS). PRL and the RFU issued a joint statement saying they were “working hard . . . to create a sustainable league”.

Ealing Trailfinders questioned that commitment, given they are being asked to spend £14.8 million on a stadium — with pressure to commit up to £20 million more in buying a share of the league — without knowing what the competition will look like from 2024.

“Where is the sanity in spending £15 million on a ground when we don’t know if we will be in that league and we don’t know if the minimum standards will change,” Ward said. “To build that without knowing why we are building it or what for would put the club at risk.”

For Ealing Trailfinders to have full rights as a Premiership club — to receive £1.5 million in central funding each year and to have a voice at the discussion table — they would need to purchase a P share.

Owning a P share is not a prerequisite for playing in the Premiership. “They expect you to have one,” Halliday said. Wasps and Worcester had their P shares bought by the league at the agreed insolvency rate of £9.8 million. Ealing Trailfinders have been quoted prices of between £15 million and £20 million.

“The DCMS report says the Premiership is unsustainable. We know this,” Ward said. “So why would the RFU or PRL ask another club to go into debt, when we have zero debt at the moment, for something that is a barrier to entry rather than being something that makes the league better.

“I am fully in favour of minimum standards — safety for players, medical staff, all of that is very important. What I am not in favour of is asking us to build a stadium for 10,000 when we are attracting a 1,000 crowd.

“By the time we build it they are telling us it may go to a ten-team league. So what are we building for? What is the future? To build without knowing what the future is, we believe that is irresponsible for the club, especially when you see what has happened with Worcester Warriors and Wasps.

“We are not sitting here saying we wouldn’t develop our stadium but we are saying it should be developed with the rate of our crowd. And as that grows we should grow.

“We have only been professional for nine years and we have everything in a calculated way.

“I believe as a club we should be applauded for doing this in the right way. As should other Championship clubs like Coventry and Doncaster, who are growing in a sustainable way.”


https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/eali ... -0sxq9xpw9

Cov beat Ealing in London. It’s tight at the top.

Some effort from Caldy. Pirates not where i expected them to be.

fivepointer wrote: ↑Sat Jan 28, 2023 5:29 pm Some effort from Caldy. Pirates not where i expected them to be.

Watch it.

Soo… Doncaster eligible for promotion but Ealing are not.

I'm impressed Doncaster bothered applying for it. It's hardly going to be relevant to them this season. Mind, that last sentence is probably why the RFU let them pass.

Puja

Ah the Ealing lawyers are going to be busy then.

FKAS wrote: ↑Mon Feb 13, 2023 9:18 pm Ah the Ealing lawyers are going to be busy then.

Good, hope Ealing win!

I thought the RFU had released statements about allowing phase capacity increases? Surely, if they are on record as saying that, then turning round and saying "has to 10K" then they're on a sticky wicket.

edit- https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fw ... riteria%2F

jimKRFC wrote: ↑Tue Feb 14, 2023 10:38 am

FKAS wrote: ↑Mon Feb 13, 2023 9:18 pm Ah the Ealing lawyers are going to be busy then.

Good, hope Ealing win!

I thought the RFU had released statements about allowing phase capacity increases? Surely, if they are on record as saying that, then turning round and saying "has to 10K" then they're on a sticky wicket.

edit- https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fw ... riteria%2F

They have, but Ealing have submitted their application without any plan for capacity increases at all. They're deliberately picking a fight by submitting an application that will fail and then arguing that the lack of clarity the RFU is providing about the future plans for the league make it financially impractical to commit to ground expansion and buying into P-shares.

Puja

Puja wrote: ↑Tue Feb 14, 2023 11:06 am They have, but Ealing have submitted their application without any plan for capacity increases at all.

Missed that info! Where did you read that? I'm now torn between "hope they win" and "sod'em"...

jimKRFC wrote: ↑Tue Feb 14, 2023 12:49 pm

Puja wrote: ↑Tue Feb 14, 2023 11:06 am They have, but Ealing have submitted their application without any plan for capacity increases at all.

Missed that info! Where did you read that? I'm now torn between "hope they win" and "sod'em"...

https://12ft.io/proxy?ref=&q=https://ww ... ship-says/

“Ealing Trailfinders were not able to evidence the necessary licensed capacity, supported by a safety certificate or planning permission to achieve a capacity of over 10,000. Ealing Trailfinders are therefore not eligible for promotion to the Premiership at the end of season 2022-23.”
...
It is understood that Ealing Trailfinders could have nominated an alternative ground at which to play in case of their promotion but elected to nominate Vallis Way as their principal home ground.

Reads to me like they've just said, "This is our home ground" and completely let blank the section about, "How do you plan to get to 10k within 2 years?" Spoiling for a fight and, tbh, I can't blame them. No-one knows what the hell the future plans are for the leagues and I don't blame Ealing for getting stroppy about being asked to invest in something that they may then get shafted out of in future.

Puja

There’s also the added point that they may invest in the stadium only to get relegated when the league is cut to ten.

Yeah, I don't blame them at all - and I don't like the 10k capacity requirement in the fist place (it's not beyond the wit of man to have all the same requirements per person in a 5k stadium!)

However, I also don't have any sympathy if they submit a bid they know for a fact is going to fail; and it then fails.

Fourth vs second live on your laptop @ 15.00 today:

https://www.championshiprugby.co.uk/home

As Ealing’s ground is considered to be unworthy for Premiership rugby, I wonder if Jersey Reds’ ground is? If Ealing win today against the mighty Blues then their home match with Ealing next week is significant.