Tickets go on sale for Hazell-Mears testimonial

Tickets have gone on sale for a pre-season fixture with a difference to help Gloucester get ready for the 2009-10 season. The game between Glaws and their old rivals Bath is a joint testimonial for two long-serving players and, as testimonials go, few are more deserving than Andy Hazell and Lee Mears.

The game will be played at Kingsholm on Saturday August 15 (3.0pm) and tickets are on sale at both clubs now.
We don’t begrudge either player the chance to make a few bob and we are just as well aware as anybody of the fact that both are one-club stalwarts in a career which doesn’t offer a lot once you reach your mid-30s.
Like footy and so many other professional sports, club rugby is a hard task-master and only a very small minority of former players go on to earn a living in the game once their playing careers are over.
The majority reach retirement age and they are suddenly cast adrift in the big wide world looking for a job, with perhaps 30 years of work left in them.
So they can’t be blamed for wanting to earn as much as possible while they can.
But, in this day and age when bankers and city workers have been targeted to take a share of the blame for the current economic crisis and MPs have been criticised over the House of Commons expenses scandal, can we justify giving highly-paid sportsmen the sort of cash handouts Hazell and Mears stand to make next month?
The country is full of people who have worked for just one employer, some work for one employer all their lives – but they don’t get huge cash handouts at the end of their careers.
The impact of testimonials was put in the spotlight a few years ago when footballer Niall Quinn was given a testimonial and he split the £1m-plus the game raised between a children’s hospital in his home city of Dublin and a children’s ward at a hospital in Sunderland, where he is now chairman of the Premiership club.

Former England player Alan Shearer followeds suit soon afterwards and his Newcastle United testimonial money benefited a local hospice.
All this is not meant as a criticism of Hazell or Mears or of their clubs, not do we suggest they hand the cash over to charity.
We are merely putting a point forward which we believe is worth discussion – testimonials were invented by footy clubs decades ago to reward long-serving players who had spent their careers being paid peanuts for playing in front of massive crowds.

Those days are over in rugby union as well as football.