Newport-based club is thrilling its loyal fans and proving it is more than just a commodity despite ridiculous WRU plans to shrink the game in Wales

Excitement was high for the Benetton game on Saturday night but the Dragons needed a late try to earn a 15-15 draw
HUW FAIRCLOUGH/GETTY IMAGES

All last week, I followed the news from the Dragons’ media department at Rodney Parade as they prepared for Saturday’s match against Benetton. They were excited because tickets were selling well. “Only 15 tickets left for the Bisley stand,” they pronounced one day.

And by Thursday, there were “only 65 left” for the massive Candleston stand. That might sound a lot of vacant places for one stand but the Candleston is vast; it has stood gaunt and sentinel, but somehow homely, for a vast chunk of the 149 years Newport, now the Dragons, have played at Rodney Parade. Under that hulking edifice, both the All Blacks and Springboks lost to the local heroes.

The crowd was excellent considering, like the other three regional teams, the Dragons had to play without their international stars. The Welsh Rugby Union (WRU), the governing body which (appallingly) wishes to kill off one or maybe two of the country’s valiant professional teams, has always made so many demands of players that when they arrive back at their clubs they are knackered.

The Dragons have won a few games this season, whereas last season they hardly won at all. Now they have two strong and determined investors, the businessmen David Wright and David Buttress. They have gradually started to sign better players. The fans have been long-suffering but even in their lowest of down periods, it has never taken more than one win to bring the town back to the club.

Rugby is still in the blood, if sometimes hidden. But the present can still feel like the past when we were queueing up in school, around the block, for the complimentary tickets for Rodney Parade they gave to pupils; with good old Mr Harries dishing them out.

There are only four professional teams in Wales. But we now know the WRU (meant to be devoted to expanding the game) wants to savage at least one of them out of existence, and to reduce another to semi-professionalism — the first step to oblivion and the most crass of economies.

Last week the WRU — the worst administration that even rugby has ever seen (and there have been some dire contenders) — had to appear before the Senedd, the Welsh parliament — for the second time. All the MPs in towns and cities where the existence of the professional clubs is at stake have already complained bitterly. Ruth Jones, the MP for Newport West, sent me a powerhouse reaction to the idea that the Dragons may be in danger. There are two legal actions in process.

WRU Chairman Richard Collier-Keywood, Director of Rugby and Elite Performance Dave Reddin, and Chief Executive Abi Tierney at a press conference.

Collier-Keywood, left, and Reddin, centre have faced many a public grilling over their plans

KIAN ABDULLAH/HUW EVANS/SHUTTERSTOCK

As Richard Collier-Keywood, the WRU chairman, faced his questions, most people found his appearance an utter non-event. WRU grandees, apparently, have missed an outpouring of opposition to their plans from professional players, amateur players, retired greats, recent Welsh captains, referees, media of all sorts and fans of all descriptions — the biggest pile-on I have ever witnessed on social media and in all the other forms of communications.

Last week Rob Regan, the former chief operating officer at Principality, the building society that has naming rights for the national stadium in Cardiff, came out and declared that he was creating a panel of the informed and involved outside the WRU — to head off its ridiculous plans to shrink the game and to leave possibly half the country without a professional team to aspire to, to draw followers, to develop coaches. It was a sensational intervention.

The architect of the (ghastly) new look for Welsh rugby is Dave Reddin, the elite performance director. Presumably he has done some maths and worked out that three teams cost less than four, almost as if the four clubs were different brands of washing powder to be dumped.

Elsewhere, the other three regions are battling like mad. They have always been downplayed, underfunded and otherwise crippled by the WRU but their traditions and their responsibilities to emerging players in Wales keeps them going.

The Ospreys team and followers came further to life recently when they found that the owners of their club had bid to take over Cardiff, and the dunderheads at the WRU made them preferred bidders — it seemed secretive, opportunist and massively inappropriate. The Ospreys players walked out of a meeting with their former friends, and the support has been furious.

The Scarlets, the club of the people, have found hard times but they have added coaches, kept fighting.

Cardiff, after going into administration and coming under the control of the WRU, have been attracting bigger and more raucous audiences — but are now trying to absorb the blow that a bid to buy them led by Martyn Ryan, who kept them afloat for years previously as a director, has been overtaken for reasons which the WRU will not expand on. He and his investors are all still in place awaiting developments.

It is a staggering fact that, Jamie Roberts apart, no member of the WRU executive or the board represents pro rugby. There is one man who apparently holds office in the professional game. His name is Malcolm Wall and he is listed as independent chairman of the Professional Rugby Board (PRB). If you search the internet you find a question from Wales Online: “So, who is this man who operates in the shadows yet holds one of the most powerful positions in Welsh rugby?” Mr Wall, when are you going to speak on behalf of the professional clubs?

The WRU now faces an EGM called by the smaller clubs of Central Glamorgan and we can only hope and pray that those clubs have not done so simply to boost the community game representation on the main board.

Jamie Roberts sitting on a bench in front of a stone wall.

Roberts, the former Cardiff, Dragons and Wales centre, is a non-executive director at the WRU

Another group has been in touch with The Sunday Times listing nearly 20 errors of fact or procedures committed by the WRU; some of them annoying but others damning.

And how is it going to develop players if it does not want the four regions, or perhaps the remaining two, to do the job? It has produced a vast plan costing £28million (so the game is not quite as strapped for cash as the WRU tried to insist) to build a national academy and a new talent development system, with various satellite operations across the country, other fiddly bits here and there. One senior coach told me last week that it looked like something planned on a whiteboard, gilding lilies, including pompous elements totally unnecessary and, above all, misunderstanding Welsh rugby. The pro clubs, given proper support, will perform the development function perfectly well in existing buildings.

In sport, very few teams make much of a profit. Very few club teams in rugby make a profit, all the Premiership teams in England have struggled to a greater or lesser extent. Very few of the County Championship cricket teams make a profit. The RFU at Twickenham is in debt.

The senseless axing of a great name is not revival. It is death. Here is a prime number for you Mr Collier-Keywood and Mr Reddin: four pro teams, for ever. If ever you get your finances sorted, sign a few big deals for a change, then you can start the fifth — a team based in London so that Welsh players are not being stolen away by other nations, as they have been since the WRU scrapped the exiles pathway programme.

The Dragons have really been through the mill. It will be an awfully long time before they beat New Zealand again. But if the conspirators at the WRU touch any of the clubs, they will prove themselves soulless fools; the clubs may lose a few quid, that is what benefactors are for — but the soul remains. Long live Cardiff, the Dragons, the Scarlets and the Ospreys.

They must outlast us all, and especially outlast the misguided non-rugby experts who confuse them with a commodity, and scatter those adrift whose work or leisure lives depend on them.

Home

Untitled Page 1

Dragons roaring again and exposing soulless fools killing Welsh rugby