“You don’t need to be local to have a rugby club in your soul”

Rugby’s most outspoken and influential journalist

LET’S START with controversy. I would impose no limit on the number of foreign players in the Gallagher Premiership. And I’d give far more independence and freedom to the Scottish, Irish and Welsh teams in the United Rugby Championship so that they could bring in more overseas talent too.

It’s easy to imagine the steam now coming from the ears of national coaches and chief executives. Well, sorry. But I have never seen club/provincial rugby as some sort of slavish process that is there chiefly to produce players for one national team.

Everybody knows that clubs find it difficult to balance the books, and for many different reasons, so the idea of fielding some exotica of true world class so that the box office does good business is attractive in itself.

And here we are not talking about project players signed by a union and then