A quick rant

By Rich W
November 1 2006

Without the usual round of reports it's down to our own one eyed Rich W to climb the steps to the lofty heights of the soapbox and proclaim to one and all what upsets him, so without further ado Rich W says....

Shall we rant ?

Here’s a thought: We all have our complaints about our game; our gripes and grizzles, moans and groans. So with a view to looking after our mental health and promoting a little debate how about we vent on them?

I’ll list a few – you pick the one you want to have your say on: the RFU, Andy Robinson, Pat Howard, the Pay-offs, the Anglo Whelk, Peter Tom/Peter Wheeler, stadium redevelopment, style of play – open-sides, centres, kicking discipline, referees, over coaching, lack of skills, too much physicality – you name it.

Take half an hour to rant on one of these. It’s good for the soul – and it’ll keep the site active – no more shut downs.

Anyway – since it was my idea – I’ll go first!

Always best to start at the top: the Rugby Football Union whose battle for power over the game appears to have blinded their apparatchiks to the fact that they are representatives of a Union.

A brief consideration of semantics and the meaning of words anyone? My dictionary holds the word ‘union’ to mean:

1. the act of uniting two or more things.
2. the state of being united.
3. something formed by uniting two or more things; combination.
4. a number of persons, states, etc., joined or associated together for some common purpose: student union; credit union.
5. a group of states or nations united into one political body, as that of the American colonies at the time of the Revolution, that of England and Scotland in 1707, or that of Great Britain and Ireland in 1801.
6. the Union. the United States: The Union defeated the Confederacy in 1865.
7. a device emblematic of union, used in a flag or ensign, sometimes occupying the upper corner next to the staff or occupying the entire field.
8. the act of uniting or an instance of being united in marriage or sexual intercourse: an ideal union; an illicit union.
9. an organization of workers; a labor union.
10. Mathematics. a. Also called join, logical sum, sum. the set consisting of elements each of which is in at least one of two or more given sets. b. the least upper bound of two elements in a lattice.
11. the process or result of merging or integration of disjoined, severed, or fractured elements, as the healing of a wound or broken bone, the growing together of the parts in a plant graft, the fusion of pieces in a welding process, or the like.
12. the junction or location at which the merging process has taken place.
13. any of various contrivances for connecting parts of machinery or the like.
14. Textiles. a. a fabric of two kinds of yarn.
b. a yarn of two or more fibers.

Now I think we can disregard, for our purposes, nos 5,6,7,9,10, 11, 12, 13 & 14 which leaves us: the act of uniting two or more things; the state of being united; something formed by uniting two or more things; a number of persons, states, etc., joined or associated together for some common purpose; the act of uniting or an instance of being united.

Anyone detecting a theme here?

A ‘union’, as far as I can tell from these definitions is not an organisation which takes on a life of its own to promote its own self-serving agenda at the expense of some of its constituent parts. It is not a body which seeks to coerce, to their disadvantage, those constituents to meet its own demands and desires.

It seems to me that a ‘Union’ is a function of united parts not a greater whole.

Of course there has to be unity, and discipline, and commonality of purpose – they are all encompassed by the definitions above. Any cohesive body, any ‘Leviathan’ of many parts requires these - but only in service of the shared objective. Once that objective becomes unclear, obscure, fragmented then the Union’s ability to function must needs be readdressed. In political philosophy it’s often called a revolution!

In the case of the Rugby Football Union we see a body – no longer a Union but entity with a rationale and an agenda all of its own abusing a political and economic position which it has, without any clear mandate assumed over those parts which should be controlling it.

Tail wagging dog. If you catch my drift?

Mind you we should we be surprised? It’s all happened once before. August 1895 twenty two clubs secede from the Rugby Football Union and form the Northern Union (which in the 1920s became the ‘Rugby League’).

Who was it said that ‘he who fails to learn the lessons of history is doomed to repeat them’?


OK – so I’ve started us off - the soapbox is yours…