Powerhouse: Trinity (in blue) – or MidWives as was – have won their opening two games in Counties 1 Surrey/Sussex, including the 34-33 cliffhanger at Haywards Heath last weekend
The club rugby season is well underway, with a couple of crunch derbies this Saturday – Old Walcs against Purley John Fisher, and Streatham and Croydon versus Warlingham. But will all local sides be able to field a full XV? JOHNNY DOBBYN investigates an existential crisis for the sport at grassroots level
At the end of the 2023-2024 rugby season, Fish and Chips RFC – a hybrid veterans side drawing players from Purley John Fisher and Chipstead (geddit?) – completed a remarkable double by retaining their Surrey veterans league cup.
What made this cup run remarkable was that Fish and Chips did not play a single game to do so.
All opposition sides cried off their fixtures throughout the tournament, and we won the cup simply because we were able to field a team. Last men standing, so to speak.
The basis of the formation of Fish and Chips was to try to ensure that older players wanting to get game time were guaranteed being part of a sizeable squad that wouldn’t struggle for availability. This has obviously paid off, in trophies, if not game time.
Other clubs don’t necessarily have the luxury of a neighbour in order to pursue a similar initiative. Nor, it must be said, the benefit of such a catchy name. Increasingly, many older players, some in their late fifties, are still required for “regular” Saturday fixtures for their club’s second XV, sometimes even the first XV. Vets rugby is a “nice to play” for most clubs, rather than a must.
Kick start: Ross Lever kicks a conversion for Old Walcountians, whose season has begun with two defeats
Even moving vets’ fixtures to midweek in order to free people up for Saturday games hasn’t necessarily helped.
Here’s the rub. The requirement to include older players in teams on Saturdays, and the failure of so many clubs to put out vets teams at all, is indicative of a sustained decline in participation in the male adult game at grassroots clubs.
There are not enough younger players coming through, or existing age-group players being retained beyond their teens, so that vets are not needed to play for their main teams.
Accurate playing stats in rugby are notoriously hard to come by – those quoted by the International Rugby Board and on the interweb are woefully old, and off. But reportedly, there has been a decline from 259,600 active players in England in 2016 to 133,600 at the end of the 2021 season. The greatest loss of players being among men.
Covid had a hand in that decline, and overall playing numbers recovered to 223,300 by the end of 2023. However, that is still a net loss of 36,300 players.
Those overall playing stats don’t distinguish between gender and age grade. The decline in the number of men playing senior club rugby is masked by the growth in the women’s and minis’ games.
The RFU, the governing body for rugby in England, inadvertently gave the game away last week when defending chaos caused by extending its online “Game Management System” – whereby players, rather than clubs, become responsible for their own registrations – down to the eighth tier of the game.
The eighth tier locally is Counties 2 Surrey, which includes Purley John Fisher, Chipstead, Old Caterhamians, Old Walcountians and Old Whitgiftians.
Recruitment drive: despite clubs’ best efforts, there are fewer players to go round
When approached about the failure of the online platform, the RFU replied: “99% of rugby clubs in England have teams registered ahead of the season, starting with 72,000 adult and 100,000 age-grade players already registered.”
That’s right: 99% of clubs. 72,000 adults.
That’s 61,600 players down in just three years – and the total figure includes players in the women’s game.
Locally, we can see this player exodus in the number of sides clubs are fielding.
When formed from Purley and John Fisher in 1997, PJF was fielding five sides per week. This is now down to two, with the vets playing between PJF’s 2nd XV and Fish and Chips as required.
At the time of the PJF merger, Warlingham was the enviable pick of the bunch and had eight senior sides. By 10 years ago, that was down to four, plus vets, whereas now the vets are described as the 4ths, and one source describes availability for the other three sides as “patchy at best”.
This is despite Warlingham having probably the strongest minis set-up in the area. The youngsters learning the game at Hamsey Green have not been feeding through into the senior sides in the numbers hoped for, or needed.
Similarly, another once strong local contender, Old Walcountians, based at Woodmansterne, hasn’t put out more than two teams for 10 years and – relegated last season to Counties 2 – is now apparently struggling to fill those.
Historically (meaning going back 40 years or more), the oldest and strongest club in the area had been Streatham and Croydon, based at Frant Road in Thornton Heath. Founded in 1871, its heyday in the 1970s saw its games featuring on television – and the club running nine senior teams. Promoted to Counties 3 Surrey this season, Strets professes to now have three XVs.
Below Counties 3, many clubs live with just about two teams at best, and mostly hoping to field even one.
So where have all the players gone?
The choice of alternative entertainment and leisure activities is obviously significantly greater than it was 20 or 30 years ago, yet the fundamental problem appears to be one of recruitment and replenishment – and the recent issue lies with schools, with the number of children participating in rugby dropping by 20% since 2016.
Chris Rollings, former director of sport at Sedbergh and Cheltenham College, and author of Challenges for the Future of Rugby Football in Schools, cites three reasons for the drop in school participation. These are the “demise of compulsion”, parental objection arising from injury concerns, and “professionalisation” and “academisation” of rugby at Sixth Form.
Whizzing wing: Omari Brown on his way to scoring a try for Old Walcs last week
In the 1970s and 1980s, rugby was a compulsory sport in schools like John Fisher, Wallington Boys and Whitgift.
At John Fisher, while still a grammar school, a boy’s place depended on the parents signing an agreement that he would be available for competitive sports.
At that time, the only sport played in the autumn and spring terms was rugby.
In the 1980s, there were several disputes with the school where Year 11 and Sixth Form boys who’d had enough or simply wanted Saturday jobs were disciplined for refusing to play. Some were even asked to leave the school.
Now, according to Rollings, there is no school where contact rugby is compulsory.
As a consequence, there is a marked decline in participation through the year groups – starting at 94% involvement at Year 7 down to 31% in Year 11 and 27% in Sixth Form.
This chimes perfectly with increasing parental disquiet at the injury potential of rugby through concussion and dementia cases, and the publication of Professor Allyson Pollock’s book, Tackling Rugby: What Every Parent Should Know About Injuries.
Worse, this year a report from Winchester University branded contact rugby as “a form of child abuse”.
They stated: “Cultural perception is that striking a child outside of sport is abuse, but striking a child in sport is somehow socially acceptable.”
Whitgift star: Elliot Daly moved quickly from the South Croydon school playing fields to Wasps (later Saracens), England and the British and Irish Lions
No wonder parents are opting their children out.
Then there is the issue of “professionalism” at some elite, independent schools. At Whitgift, the cohort of rugby players recruited when aged around 15 years old on sports bursaries were referred to disparagingly by other pupils as the “jocks” or “BTECs”.
These young men were on punishing conditioning routines, often expected in the (very well-appointed) gym at 7am, in a way that didn’t exist 20 or 30 years earlier. Many, if not all, of the top players were also part of professional rugby clubs’ academies – Wasps, Harlequins or London Irish – with all the additional pressures that might bring.
It did well for Whitgift, winning the under-18s National Schools’ Cup at Twickenham three times, and producing England internationals such as Danny Cipriani, Marland Yarde, Harry Williams and Elliot Daly.
The problem arises when these behemoths encounter “normal” age-grade players.
As lead sports physician for the English Institute of Sport, Professor Mike Loosemore, says, “Professional rugby players are much bigger than they used to be – and schools seem to be following that course. The collision forces are so much higher now because people are genuinely bigger.”
Rollings describes this as “polarisation”.
He says: “The contrast between the best athletes and the others is stark, making the game less attractive to the latter. House matches have become unworkable on safety grounds. The exodus of players has not been amongst the marquee performers: it is the boys of average size, ability and commitment who are no longer finding the game as attractive.”
If schools can’t retain their own players, then the recruitment pool for the “coarse” game at grassroots clubs will inevitably dry up – as we are seeing.
Keeping the game alive: Trinity (in blue) are the area’s top club at present
There is pluralist stagnation as clubs compete for fewer and fewer entrants to the senior game. With an inevitable wave of player retirements every season, clubs that can’t replenish their sides – without a wealthy patron chucking cash at journeymen and academy rejects – will field fewer teams over time, perhaps eventually folding.
At a Surrey level, every season we see clubs dropping out of their league because of an inability to fulfil their fixtures.
With schools rugby facing “an existential threat” according to Rollings, the adult game must inevitably suffer, as one RFU administrator confirmed in The Guardian in 2022.
Adult recreational, contact rugby as we know it today is in a terminal condition, the RFU man said: “We will probably see an NFL-type franchise professional game, a strong game in the universities and a first-team club league. But you probably won’t see a social and recreational game in the way we understand it.
“I won’t say recreational players are an endangered species, but they’re certainly at risk.”
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Am I right that all the schools referred to in this article are either private (fee paying) or selective or both? The wider question is sport in schools as a whole as rugby isn’t the only one which is declining. Where are our next cricket players going to come from? I’m not the first to say that the sale of playing fields have had a massive negative effect.
“Am I right that all the schools referred to in this article are either private (fee paying) or selective or both?”
No.
Thanks for the answer!😊
Old Croydonians RFC (Selhurst Grammar Old Boys) no longer exists. It was never a popular sport with the pupils and when the school became a High School, there was a serious movement (finally successful) to play soccer as well as rugby.