After weeks of mud and guts, Warlingham still have a chance

RUGBY ROUND-UP: With one Saturday of the season left to play, our local clubs’ fates are already decided – with one notable exception. PLUS: a grassroots rebellion against the blazers at Twickenham falls flat as controversial CEO survives his no confidence vote.

Our man in the scrum, JOHNNY DOBBYN, reports

The last game of the club rugby club season takes place this Saturday yet, with one important exception, league places are already set regardless of how the final game plays out.

Warlingham, currently at the foot of Counties 3 Surrey – basically the Surrey County 2nd Division, in old money – have had a miserable time since their relegation at the end of the 2022-2023 season. Before that, they had been two divisions higher and the top-placed club in the Croydon area. Even Warl’s keenest critics felt they had good grounds to feel hard done by then when, as a result of the latest of the RFU’s usual impenetrable reorganisations, the woeful Cranleighans – who had failed to turn up for four of their scheduled games – survived the drop.

Yet Warlingham, who went AWOL just twice that term, were relegated.

Since then, not much has gone right for the Hamsey Green-based club, who suffered a second successive relegation last year and were looking down the barrel at a third drop on the bounce after only two league wins to their name since this season got underway last September.

However, there is a reprieve rumoured to be on the horizon with the suggestion that two other clubs in their division are about to pull out of the league altogether.

Word in the smoking area of Whelan’s in South Croydon is that two other clubs, Economicals and London Media, have had enough of the weekly struggle to get out a side, and their withdrawal would unbalance the usual two-up-two-down promotion and relegation merry-go-round. Faced with that unresolvable conundrum, the alickadoos at the RFU will simply allow Warlingham to stay put. It would be the first and only thing to have gone Warl’s way these past three years.

To date, neither Economicals nor London Media has responded to iC’s enquiries, and, of course, there’s been not a peep about all this from those who are supposed to be managing the competitons.

Further up the leagues, the club that heads Croydon’s rankings, as last season, is Trinity, with a solid fifth place in Counties 1 Surrey/Sussex.

The start of the season had promised so much more, the Old Mid-Whitgiftians (as they were) winning their first nine games on the trot. This superb run came to a shuddering halt at the end of November with the Lime Meadow lads going from heroes to zeroes – literally – as they were “nilled” by Cobham and London Cornish in successive weeks.

A bounceback the following week against Haywards Heath proved to be of the dead cat variety, as the last match before Christmas saw them go down heavily 55-17 at Weybridge. January saw one win and one defeat, while February was a results write-off, as former high-flyers Trinity were comprehensively beaten by Eastbourne (64-17), Twickenham (47-5) and Old Rutlishians (49-15).

March was better, with all Trinity’s games last month being wins, with just this Saturday’s game against bottom of the league and relegated Haileyburians to come.

One notable feature of the Counties 1 Surrey/Sussex season was the complete absence of walkovers, something that has plagued the adult male game at least since it went into to decline during and following the pandemic, as we reported towards the start of the season.

Sadly, the same cannot be said of Counties 2 Surrey, where there have been 12 walkovers conceded from the 126 fixtures so far – with one round of games still to play this Saturday. Even a back-rower can work out that that is too close to 10% of all games being conceded not to be a cause for alarm.

For a change, the absenteeism is not all down to Cranleighans. An inability to raise a side has affected many clubs, including top-of-the-table teams such as Chipstead and Purley John Fisher.

This Saturday’s games include PJF v Old Wimbledonians, Old Walcountians v Old Amplefordians, Old Whitgiftians at Cranleighians and Chipstead at Kingston. Local clubs occupy four of the top five places in the league: Old Caterhamians are promoted to Counties 1, while Chips finished third with PJF and Old Whits closing out the season in fourth and fifth respectively.

Warlingham’s fate now lies in the hands of others while the once truly mighty Streatham and Croydon – promoted last year – finished eighth with seven wins from 19 games. Finishing fourth from bottom may feel reasonably comfortable, yet it won’t have escaped the attention of the powers that be at Frant Road that that lofty position is largely a function of dismal seasons from the clubs below them.

Even lower down the league structure, in Counties 5 Surrey – the lowest tier in English rugby – Croydon RFC (the club formed from the merger of Shirley Wanderers and Old Croydonians) finished the year in eighth place (of 10), two spots above Merton. Merton managed to amass league points of an astonishing -23 – yes, minus 23 – thanks to no-showing to one-third of their matches, and giving them the dubious honour of being England’s worst rugby club.

Sweeney survives

In other news, late last month Bill Sweeney, the chief executive of the Rugby Football Union, managed to survive a vote of no confidence.

The Special General Meeting was called following pressure from the Whole Game Union, a lobby group formed primairly, it seems, to serve the interests of clubs in the Championship, the second tier of the professionalised game.

Grassroots dissatisfaction with the RFU, with many local clubs feeling that the adult male community game has been abandoned by the blazers at Twickenham, as well as annoyance at bonuses paid to board members after poor financial results, meant the SGM became a forum for general grumbling with the way the game is run from HQ. There was even some talk of a schism, with the amateur game splitting from the elite to look after their own affairs.

In the main, Croydon’s clubs stayed surprisingly tight-lipped about the way they would be voting in the SGM, or if they were to vote at all.

The key resolution read: “It is resolved that the members have no confidence in the CEO (Mr Bill Sweeney) and call upon the RFU Board of Directors to terminate his employment at the RFU as soon as practicably possible.”

Chipstead were diplomatic about their feelings, with president Alan Webb coyly commenting simply: “As a community club we are concerned that grassroots rugby has not been receiving the financial and logistical support from the RFU that it desperately needs.”

At Walcountians, their club sceretary Neil Pemberton told us: “My view and that of the majority of those I have spoken to at the club over the last few years is that the RFU has all but abandoned the ‘community’ or grassroots game. We do not expect any meaningful help or support from them, and we don’t mean by way of money, either.

“They have no interest in the clubs.”

Pemberton referred to a player registration system as “an overt bid by the RFU to rip the relationship with the player away from the clubs and have it sit with them”.

He said: “They would rather be able to say that the erosion of playing numbers has slowed up nationally without acknowledging that thousands of teams and clubs have gone under. As long as playing numbers level out, they couldn’t give a monkey’s that so many clubs have folded.

“We have taken solace in forging stronger relationships with our neighbouring clubs in order to find solutions to help us all. But it’s not easy.”

Pemberton said that opinion at his club was divided over Sweeney’s fate. “Some believe he should go as the optics are awful, some of us feel that, essentially, he is guilty purely of receiving an agreed and earned bonus and should not be hounded out on this alone.”

In the event, Sweeney survived the vote with 66% against the resolution (672 out of 1,300 potential votes cast, 36 abstentions), thought largely due to the failure of the WGU to offer a coherent Plan B.

And so the powers that be in TW2 will feel free to watch the sad death spiral of the grassroots game at their leisure.

After 50 seasons playing rugby, as a schoolboy, for Purley Colts, for Fisher Old Boys, for Purley John Fisher and for Fish and Chips RFC’s veterans, our rugby correspondent Johnny Dobbyn is hanging up his boots – probably. Saturday, March 22, saw Dobbyn play his last game of the regular season, although there is the possibility of a final, final outing in the Surrey Vets Cup Final on April 26. Provided, of course, that the opposition don’t cry off.

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