The Rafferty Report – Frisked

Highlights of the Independent Review into the WRU. The quotes are taken from the Report, with my comments in bold This Report was commissioned by the WRU after great pressure was put on it by a superb BBC Documentary headed up by Wyre Davies, but that pressure was ramped up by Politicians in Wales to...

Competition is Healthy….

My previous little rant started with "All 5 professional, competing, rugby teams in Wales are going through a busy, long summer" and now it is clear as to why the FIVE are in competition. With the announcement of a "Farewell to Alun Wyn Jones" game on November 4th, the WRU have hammered both the rugby...

The State of this Nation – Summer 2023

All 5 professional, competing, rugby teams in Wales are going through a busy, long summer. For three of them - the WRU, Cardiff and the Dragons - it's both the end of an era and the start of a new adventure. The Turks are (seemingly) the most settled of the 5 whilst the Ospreys are...

The Maths Of Pro Rugby – Wales is Skint

Warning - the following will contain numbers, some limited assumptions and some rounding up. It won't appease the romantics, the disenfranchised or the lovers of compass point teams (you know the people - those who never use numbers to support their opinion. Last year the WRU earned (turned over) £85.3m. It also collected another £11.7m...

2+2? 3+1? How about a meritocracy instead?

So it's tomorrow and Wednesday that will see meetings of the (new) Professional Rugby Game Board to decide how the financial pie of Welsh rugby is to be divided, for an unknown period of time and in an unknown way. Let's remember that the PRGB is supposedly made up of 4 x PRW reps (the...

3+1

As the WRU has spent 15 years (and longer) trying to drive private finance out of the game in Wales, it seems to make more and more sense to go to a 3+1 model. Buttress is playing at being Chairman of the Dragons (in this context) as he's spent next to nothing of his own...

One Night in Bilbao

Before the next season starts, it's always worth reviewing the end of the previous season and, for Cardiff Blues, it ended in an extraordinary fashion. Now, winning cups is nothing new to a Cardiff Rugby fan of a certain age but there was something different about beating Gloucester in Spain. Firstly, Gloucester were favourites with...

John Mulvihill’s first week

Swapping life on the Gold Coast for the wonders of Cardiff can't have been an easy decision, but JM seems to have done his research on Cardiff Rugby. An assured performance in his first media conference has given the supporters an insight into the game plan he wants to use and how he's very much...

Chasing the Punter

There is a lot of narrative in Welsh rugby about two of its core issues: crowd sizes and money. The less well informed look at crowd sizes in Ireland (well, in Limerick, Dublin and Belfast) with little comprehension to the size of the market and automatically assume that we in Wales should be able to...

U-Turn if you want to

It's not boring being a Cardiff Rugby supporter. Whether the team on the pitch is trying to run in tries from everywhere or whether the board is trying to work out whether its a property development company or a rugby club, things rarely stand still for long. Indeed, there are more jinks to come in...