The Seftimes

Vintage Sefton produced their best display of the season to savage Vulcan with a six-try spectacular.

Top men Dave Neary and Mark Tyms each scored two tries the others coming after a superb 60 yard effort by Brian Gardner and a chip ahead and gather by Peter McBride. Paul Evangelides added four conversions.

Sir, Well done the Rugby Football Union! After Cliff Brittle’s appointment as chairman of the executive committee in January and a period for fact-finding consultation and negotiation, it was right to throw down the gauntlet to the senior clubs (report April 10). Rugby Union is living in difficult and dangerous times and David Hands tells us a sorry tale of strident arrogance, personal vilification arid greed by the"top clubs".The RFU has to service the needs of all clubs both great and small. In particular, in the face of the collapse of rugby coaching in our schools, we need the excellent but expensive new RFU structure of coaching and refereeing courses and all the necessary infrastructure and administration that goes into maintaining an ongoing wide base of available and improving players. Expensive imported talent may sparkle briefly but English rugby lives off it at its peril. The irresponsible demands for each top club gathered under the banner of English professional Rugby Union Clubs (EPRUC) to be given £1 million are unrealistic and do no match the product. Poor individual skills amongst the majority of these clubs do not warrant inflated player payments as yet certainly not to the detriment of support of the wider game. The game in England is in a state of flux. who is to say that the clubs that are currently in the top ten, or 20, or even top 40 are the wisest, the best, the correct ones to take our game forward? An exclusive, self-protective short-sighted, autonomous cartel of clubs living off talent purchased from other nurturing clubs and unions cannot be in the best interests of our game. The dubs cannot all expect to become fully professional overnight. If it takes two or three years to earn their way, so be it. If the top clubs refuse to co-operate with the RFU and they break away from the RFU (or some of them are expelled), then, surely, they must also leave the cosy umbrella of the International Board, which has ruled that all broadcasting rights are vested in the 67 world-wide unions with territorial jurisdiction. Are Welsh - or South African - clubs really going to play return fixtures against a few clubs in England without the certainty of continuing television income? Are the other European clubs really intent on playing top English clubs in a new structure without appropriate recompense? Are all the members of the current England squad so cash-oriented that they will give up hopes of all future caps and hand the chance to grace Twickenham to players in lower clubs? I think not. EPRUC should now admit that it has tried; that it has failed; and that it now agrees to go along with the RFU requirements and the wishes of the vast army of rugby union supporters who voted overwhelmingly for a "seamless" structure. I hope, too, that our top players also have the wisdom to see the writing on the wall and are not led astray by misguided, ephemeral self-interest. It would be a pity for players to become contracted to clubs about to go bust 

Yours faithfully.

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