London Welsh explained...!

Courtesy of an unusually half decent attempt at Journalism by Paul Rees of The Guardian...


London Welsh happy to be exiled to Oxford to make Premiership grade
Three years after they almost folded, London Welsh hope the move to the Kassam Stadium and the legal victory that secured promotion are the beginning of a long top-flight tenure


London Welsh start their first campaign in the Premiership against Leicester on Sunday at their new ground in Oxford, the city where, 127 years ago, the forward TE Jones scored the club's first try, a few months after a group of Welshmen meeting in a Fleet Street hotel decided to set up a team to play a few matches a year, most of them on a tour of their homeland.
The new club's battle for survival was no less hazardous than their route to the Premiership last season, when they not only had to come through the regular season in the Championship and prevail in an arduous series of play-offs but then get through the obstacle course known as the minimum standards criteria (MSC).
The problem was the primacy of tenure regulation, which London Welsh were breaching by proposing to play their Premiership matches at the Kassam Stadium; their Old Deer Park ground would have failed other criteria, not least those relating to capacity and floodlighting. The club overcame this hurdle with the help of an appeals panel made up of three QCs, whose judgment was that the primacy of tenure regulation should apply equally to those clubs in the top flight and to anyone seeking membership.
Promotion was not even a whispered dream at Old Deer Park in the summer of 2009, even though a few months earlier a plan had been drawn up with the aim of delivering Premiership rugby by 2012. A pending court case prevents the details of what happened then being recounted, but one of London Welsh's most famous sons, the former Lions and Wales flanker John Taylor who is now the club's managing director, feared for a few weeks that the Exiles, regarded in the early 1970s as the best club team in the world, would fold.
"We thought we had investment not only to wipe out our debts but provide us with the means to plan getting out of the Championship," Taylor says. "There was a period I feared we would be unable to pay the wages and be relegated to the bottom of the league system. If it were not for Kelvin Bryon [a former chairman and the principal investor over the years] we may well have folded. It was a horribly tough few weeks."
London Welsh went into administration but came out of it within a month. The club has only been fully professional for a year, opting before that to settle for life in the second tier, lacking the resources to sustain a push for Premiership status. The early years of league rugby from 1987 had been cruel to the Exiles: at one point they found themselves in Division Five (South), but after Clive Griffiths joined as coach in the late 1990s they started the climb back.
At the start of the 1970s, they had supplied seven players to the Lions squad that won a Test series in New Zealand for the first time, Taylor among them.
"There was a season when, putting a couple of players out of position, we could field a team of full internationals," he says. "We had the likes of Gerald Davies, Mervyn Davies, JPR Williams and John Dawes and there was one year when we won the three merit tables organised by a newspaper, English, Welsh and Anglo‑Welsh."
To play for the team then you either had to be Welsh, or of Welsh descent or to have spent at least a season with a club in Wales. When the rule was breached in 1976 to allow Neil Bennett, an English fly-half who played seven times for his country, to become an Exile it provoked a revolt of members. Bennett had been provided with a game at Colwyn Bay to facilitate his membership – the committee had discretionary powers – but it was called off and he ended up playing for the reserves.
"The rule no longer applies in the professional era, but as a club we have resolved that we will always have Welshness at our core," Taylor says. "London Irish have largely abandoned that principle, but we will not: it is important to us. We have a number of Welsh players, our head coach, Lyn Jones, is Welsh, and so are many of our administrators. We have dual membership of the Welsh and English rugby unions, but we play in England and some of our supporters are not Welsh."
The decision to play in Oxford did not garner overwhelming support from the club's fans, but a decision had to be made quickly to meet the MSC deadline and there was no alternative in the London area. Coaches will be provided for fans on Sunday morning from outside Old Deer Park and the London Welsh club in Gray's Inn Road. Also, in the early years, followers of the club were peripatetic. Raynes Park, Balham, Kensal Rise, Cricklewood, Holloway, Hornsey, Hampstead, Acton, Hendon, west Kensington, Leyton, West Ham, Wandsworth and Herne Hill were all home locations for London Welsh for at least one season until the club moved into Old Deer Park in 1957.
"If we had not signed an agreement with the owners of the Kassam Stadium, we would not have been promoted," Taylor says. "We had to find a ground that no one in Premiership Rugby could complain about. What happens in the future remains to be seen: if we remain in the Premiership, negotiating to buy the Kassam would be an option. Oxford is a rich, if uncultivated, rugby area and we need to expand our fan base."
London Welsh's promotion was only confirmed two months ago, leaving Jones with little time to recruit players. His biggest signing, Gavin Henson, suffered a cheekbone fracture in a friendly against Scarlets last weekend after an accidental clash of heads and will miss the opening six weeks of the campaign.
"Gavin is due a change in fortune," Taylor says. "He has been on the training ground this week and he is keen to do well. What we have to do this season is show that we can compete up front. We are under no illusions about what faces us and if we can hold our own in the scrum, it will give us a base. We have not come up to go straight back down and the likes of Lyn Jones do not contemplate failure. We fought long and hard to get here and our aim is to remain: Leicester will give us a good idea of where we stand."

Oxford will be a city of learning for the Exiles.

Interview with Lyn Jones after the first match vs Tigers.




"What happened in the summer has been well documented," he said. "But the knock-on effect is in the detail of your game. We knew we just did not have enough time to put the detail into the game.

"We had players knocking into each other in areas of the field where they weren't sure what they should be doing and that stood out and it cost us.

"I am not saying we were good enough to win but if we had upped our game at the line-out maybe we could have challenged for a bonus point, but we failed when we had opportunities to launch attacks."

Jones however, was impressed by the efforts put in by his side against the nine-time champions, and believes there is plenty to build on before their trip to title holders Harlequins on Friday.

"There is only so much tackling you can do," he added. "Leicester came in wave after wave and I was proud of the boys, they stuck in there, they gave 100 per cent and you can't ask more than that.

"There was a lot of good in our game and we now have foundations to build on and it's important we develop to become a tough team to beat.

Battle
"But it might take four to six weeks until we have something we are all comfortable with."

Leicester never really had to get out of second gear for the bonus-point win, but rugby director Richard Cockerill was still pleased with their start.

He said: "We come away with maximum points and it was a good workout for us, we did some good things in the first 25 minutes and some poor things in the last 15 minutes of the first half. In the second half we were much more accurate.

"But credit to Welsh they were up for the battle and got themselves back in it and if you are not on your game they will punish you.

"We did not know what to expect from them but there is enough experience in that side and physically they were very good and made life difficult for us."