They did 13-13 i forgot to mention i stopped watching after 10-15 minutes

London Welsh in administration and say they need between £1m and £1.5m a season to operate.


Has the world gone mad I can understand a top level club spending that sort of cash (and more besides) but for a second tier club with no TV revenue coming and gates around the 1,500 mark in it's well OTT.

A mate of mine runs a local rugby union club up here in the North East equivalent to NL2. They pay there players good win bonuses and recruit two or three overseas players on £30000 wages. Their crowds are in the low hundreds. They get money from sponsorship , bar takings and a big fat wadge from the RFU every season.

That figures. I think it was a similar story in Wales pre the Regions but now the clubs at NL2 equivalent level are back to basically amateur status as clubs just could not keep forking out for players contracts/wages.

A good mate of my dad's is a union ref. He's been sent to Singapore, Malaysia, Georgia and many other locations on reffing duty (RFU jollies).
He's adamant that union clubs rely on sponsorship rather than crowds and that clubs attracting a thousand or less can easily survive as long as the sponsorship money is coming in.

I don't know why anyone at all is surprised by the fact that crowds - and the revnues they bring - are not the be all and end all for sports teams.

They're pretty important if you're professional or paying some of your players.

I think the point he's making is that as a percentage of the overall revenue for the year, attendances at that level are peanuts compared to sponsorship and central funding.

If London Welsh pull in 1,500 punters at £10 a head, that's £15,000 every two weeks. I'd guess that's dwarfed by what they receive from other funding sources.

More or less what I said three posts up.

Hadden has left SRU.

Tuesday's Lions game was pretty shocking viewing, thought to be fair, it was played in shocking conditions. The midweek side did look pretty weak though. It doesn't have much bearing for Saturday.

The test side is tba soon. Expect Fitzgerald to be on the wing in place of Monye.