The Potential Relegation / Promotion Farce....

First topic message reminder :

Okay guys,

As you will all be aware, the Falcons should be relegated...but there is still a possibility that due to application issues, we wont be.
Only two of the four championship play off sides have applied for the premiership...and even theirs havent been approved yet.

Now how do you view this?

That which ever championship side wins the playoffs should rightly be promoted, and the Falcons beng so horribly bad for the majority of the season deserve to go down?...

OR

Do you think, that the championship teams are well aware of the promotion requirements and so should have them fixed prior to pushing for promotion...and if they dont fulfill the criteria...its their own fault....

What do you think...

Interesting piece from Paul Rees in the Grauniad today:

Is the Aviva Premiership a closed shop to second-tier clubs?

It is May that is usually the cruellest month in the European rugby calendar. Two Premiership teams will this weekend miss out on the play-off final at Twickenham, seven days after Newcastle were doomed to finish at the bottom of the table following their victory at Wasps.

Less than 48 hours later, the outlook for the Falcons looked brighter.
Bristol, the favourites to win the Championship play-offs and the only one of the semi-finalists regarded as having a strong chance of meeting the Premiership's entry criteria, lost by 21 points at Cornish Pirates and have it all to do in the second leg on Sunday.

The Pirates, along with Bedford, who lost at home to London Welsh in the first leg of their semi-final, have no chance of playing in the Premiership next season. They did not ask to be audited to see if they met the criteria knowing that their grounds would fail on several counts.

It has been assumed that London Welsh, who have been audited, would not meet the criteria on the grounds that their Old Deer Park has too low a capacity and far too few seats and that if they became tenants elsewhere, they would be knocked back because they did not have primacy of tenure.
The primacy of tenure clause is far from black and white. It essentially means that a club must be able to give an assurance that it could switch the date of a match at short notice, most usually to accommodate television. It does not require tenants to effectively pass themselves off as landlords.

London Welsh have never been in the Premiership. For years they were content to bumble along in the second tier, not wanting to go up or down, but they are confident that if they do win the Championship they would be able to take their place at the top table.

They have drawn up three groundshare plans, one of which involves hiring Twickenham Stoop from Harlequins. It would effectively give Quins an extra home match each season and the Premiership leaders not so long ago discussed Saracens moving in with them.

Sarries baulked at the cost, with Quins looking to recoup most of the millions they had spent on upgrading the ground, and the prospect of London Welsh sharing with their neighbours is remote because of the rent they would be expected to pay.

The other options involve the Exiles moving away from the Richmond area. They have not revealed the proposed locations, although Brentford's Griffin Park is not one of them; there have been suggestions they would look to play some of their matches in Wales, but they have not committed themselves to anything in writing.

The Rugby Football Union has said that it intends to reveal the results of the audit before the first leg of the final. If Cornish Pirates and Bedford are the last two standing, the RFU will have nothing to say, but London Welsh would leave it with a problem.

The deadline for Championship sides to prepare for the audits was 31 March, two months before the end of the season. London Welsh's argument with the RFU is that no club should be expected to sign up to something that would commit it to spending a considerable amount of money when the destiny of the Championship was far from resolved.
In other words, London Welsh were not going to sign a groundshare contract if there was no need to move from Old Deer Park. What it has done is draw up heads of agreement, which would be activated in the event of promotion.

London Welsh are leaving nothing to chance and their driving force is their chairman, Bleddyn Phillips, a senior partner with the law firm Clifford Chance. He has been in position for less than three months and has been in regular contact with both the RFU and Premiership Rugby with the club sanguine about the prospects of being promoted as Championship winners.

There has been concern among Championship clubs that the entry criteria amount to a restraint of trade given the myriad demands that need to be met. Sides in the second tier have a wage bill of no more than 25% of that of their Premiership counterparts and gate income is appreciably less.

The financial cost of gaining entry to the Premiership is less than the extra income received, certainly initially, because of the expenditure needed to meet the criteria: going through the audit process on its own costs.

Phillips is not someone who is prepared to take a simple no for an answer and the RFU will need to brace itself should it reject Welsh's case. His wife, Anne Pringle, was the British ambassador in Russia for four years from 2008, the first woman to hold the job.

Phillips relocated to Moscow, becoming Clifford Chance's global head of the oil and gas division. Since returning to Britain, he has not only become London Welsh's chairman but has joined the board of the Scarlets, leading to speculation about the Exiles playing some of their matches in Wales.

His presence ensures that Newcastle's future does not just hinge on Bristol failing to beat the Pirates by at least 22 points on Sunday, something they failed to do in the meeting between the sides at the Memorial Stadium in the regular season when they home side won 37-33.

Only if the Pirates win the final will Newcastle be reprieved, but the wider question is whether more latitude should be given to the winners of the Championship to the Premiership with most of the clubs in the second tier competing for a prize they have no chance of claiming.