Toulon, el equipo de moda.

El equipo francés Toulon se encuentra en la primera posición del Top 14, un equipo formado a base de talonario y parece que también bastante cabeza.

Peter Bills: Toulon are on the money and mean business
By Peter Bills
Thursday April 22 2010

He's 5ft very little, is the proprietor and publisher of 'Soleil Productions', a comic-book business, and as far as I know, has never played rugby seriously in his life.

He's a funny chap, too -- he hovers down on the touchline during matches in a nervous manner and he is never far away from a camera lens.

No matter, Mourad Boudjellal will celebrate his 50th birthday in June and the rugby club he owns, RC Toulon, is attempting to give him a rather special gift -- the French Championship Shield, the famous 'Bouclier de Brennus'.

Toulon haven't won it since 1992 and at various stages in the years since then, the club beside the Mediterranean hit such turbulent financial waters they were in danger of being submerged.
At one point, they had a €1.5m deficit, were demoted to Division 2 in 2000 and then struggled to get back among the elite. Eventually, they won promotion after five years of struggle in the lower league, but immediately slipped back down again the following season.

Equate all that, then, with the state of RC Toulon today. With this coming weekend's final round of French Top 14 fixtures, Toulon are a point clear at the top of the table. If they win at Brive on Saturday, they will go into the Championship play-offs as the top-placed side.
Furthermore, they have qualified for next season's Heineken Cup and will play Connacht for a place in the final of the Amlin Challenge Cup tomorrow week.

But under Boudjallel's ownership, Toulon have done an awful lot more. Off the field, they have galvanised a region once famed for its rugby prowess. Racing Nice, along the Mediterranean coast, were French Championship runners-up in 1983 before disappearing into anonymity -- to an extraordinary extent.

Last weekend, Toulon moved their home fixture against reigning champions Perpignan from their 13,700-capacity Felix Mayol stadium in the heart of Toulon, to the 60,000-capacity Stade Velodrome in Marseille. 58,250 turned up, a triumph for Toulon-born Boudjallel and what he has achieved at the French naval port town.

He's done it chiefly by opening his cheque book very wide indeed. Some of the game's finest players have been lured by the riches on offer.

Toulon have always had style. The club emblem is a bunch of sweet-smelling spring flowers lily of the valley, and the reason is buried deep in the pages of history. On May 1, 1895, Felix Mayol, the popular concert hall singer from Toulon, went to Paris to perform his first concert. He was greeted at the station by a lady admirer who handed him a bunch of lily of the valley, a flower traditionally given on May Day in France.

Mayol's concert was a notable success and lily of the valley became his personal emblem. Not long after the First World War ended, Mayol bought the land where Toulon Rugby Club's home now is, and donated it to the club. Lily of the valley became the club's emblem, too.
But, in modern times, Boudjallel has needed more than just a sense of history to revive his home-town club. He has spent a fortune recruiting top-line players and coaches.
fortunes

Coaches like the Australian Tim Lane, New Zealander Tana Umaga and now Frenchman Philippe Saint-Andre have been hired to improve the team's fortunes. None have come cheap, but their wages pale into insignificance alongside those of the players.

Jonny Wilkinson, currently driving the club towards the title with his metronomic goal kicking, is said to be earning close to €1m a season. Umaga, still playing besides coaching the backs, is reckoned to have been paid around €300,000 for 10 matches when he first arrived.
In no particular order, ex-Australia captain George Gregan; Victor Matfield, Joe van Niekerk and Lawrence Sephaka of South Africa; former All Blacks Jerry Collins, Andrew Mehrtens and Anton Oliver and England's World Cup-winning wing from 2003, Dan Luger, have all been signed.

Nor does the spending stop now Toulon have been successful. All Black prop Carl Hayman, the best tight-head prop in the world, has signed a two-year contract, starting from next September, at €620,000 a season.

Other recruits for next season already include wing Paul Sackey from London Wasps and Sale Sharks lock and captain Dean Scofield.

Get the extent of the challenge Connact face in their semi-final against Toulon?

Para ser grande hay que pensar en grande

Peter Bills continua pensando en grande para conseguir grandes cosas. El rugby va creciendo y debemos aprovecharlo.

Peter Bills: Clubs should be lauded for ambition

Despite the negative reaction in a few quarters to my suggestion last week that the Heineken semi-finals ought to have been staged in far bigger stadiums, the evidence mounts of huge successes for clubs who have boldly taken ordinary club games to larger venues.

The remarkable 47,106 Saracens drew to Wembley for their Guinness Premiership match against Harlequins at the weekend was a triumph for their determination to be adventurous, to push the boundaries. By no means everything Saracens have done this season has been meritorious in my eyes, but I applaud the club's ambition and courage in this respect.

Sure, they could have come a cropper because Wembley is not a cheap venue to hire. Some, like my critics from last week, would doubtless have rubbished the idea that an ordinary Premiership game between two London teams would have lured almost 50,000 to Wembley. Imagine that, just a few years ago!

But clubs like Saracens are pushing the boundaries and they are getting the support and results their ambition deserves.

London Wasps are trying something similar this coming weekend. They have hired Twickenham for the game against Bath and expectations are that a similar crowd to Wembley last weekend, around 50,000, will turn up.

Whichever way you look at it, this is an absolute triumph for the Guinness Premiership and for those clubs willing to back a hunch. And intriguingly, a similar picture is unfolding across the Channel in France. Last weekend, RC Toulon hired the 60,000 capacity Velodrome stadium in Marseille for their Top 14 match against the champions Perpignan.

The atmosphere was extraordinary; a sea of flags with the colours of both clubs and a vibrant atmosphere. At Toulon's cosy but very small ground in the middle of their town, the capacity is just 13,700. Yet they drew an astonishing 58,250?a quite remarkable difference.
Nor was this the sole example of clubs taking a punt on whether they can lure greater audiences in better stadia. Bourgoin, one of the least fashionable of the French Top 14 clubs who have struggled desperately against relegation all season, have a capacity of just 8,160 at their tiny Stade Pierre Rajon.

Last Saturday, they met Stade Toulouse and moved the fixture to the Stade Gerland in Lyon, home of the soccer Champions League semi-finalists Olympique Lyonnais. In an instant, even a sell-out 8,160 was transformed into a 30,000 crowd.

By any measure or means, these are extraordinary figures. What they reveal is a clear desire among a healthy percentage of the sports viewing population in both England and France to pay to see good quality rugby matches in top notch stadiums. As far as I'm aware, Bourgoin haven't sold out their crumbling old stadium once this season. Yet the minute they move to the major commercial hub of Lyon, they draw 30,000.

The man who started all this in France and England was Stade Francais owner Max Guazzini, the most innovative businessman rugby union has seen either side of the Channel in decades. I remember talking with Guazzini at his Paris office a year or two back, not long after he'd filled the 80,000 capacity Stade de France for an ordinary Top 14 league game between Stade Francais and Biarritz Olympique.

He smiled, and confessed "The first time we did this, when I was driving to the Stade de France for the game, I thought to myself 'You must be mad – how can we sell enough tickets to meet our costs for this event'".

But that was just the point. Guazzini made these matches 'an event' and people have flocked in ever since for them, in both France and England.

Now no-one is saying that if Saracens played every home game at Wembley, they'd get nearly 50,000. Nor do Toulon believe they could virtually sell out the atmospheric Velodrome in Marseille for every match of their season.

But it is perfectly possible to discern a serious trend here. Which leads me back to the Heineken semi-finals. Why on earth wouldn't ERC twice come close to selling out Paris, or the San Siro, Milan or Croke Park, Dublin for two matches of the magnitude of their semis?

The likes of Saracens, Toulon and Bourgoin are proving the point by their ambition.

Heineken Cup: Rise of the Celtic hordes

Tres equipos de la Magners League en los cuartos de final de la Heineken Cup, sólo uno inglés. La crisis de la Guinness parece que afecta tanto a los bolsillos como a los resultados -ver el artículo de ayer-. 11 años hace que un equipo inglés no se lleva la máxima competición internacional. Esperamos el fin de semana con "Ansia en la Plaza Francia", como canta Calamaro.

Heineken Cup: Rise of the Celtic hordes

The number of close games in the Guinness Premiership is greater than in any of the world's other major leagues: far greater, according to recent statistics compiled by the people who run the tournament. Winning margins are smaller, points are harder to score, tries are significantly more difficult to come by and crowds, seduced by the brutal competitiveness of it all, are on the increase, to the extent that gates in top-flight English rugby are fast closing in on Super 14 levels, much to the puzzlement of the southern hemisphere supremacists who consider rugby in this neck of the woods to border on the medieval.

So everything in the garden is rosy, right? Wrong. For the first time since they first banded together in 2001, the Celts are the ones ahead of the game in these islands. There is now clear blue water between the Magners League and the Premiership, and the evidence is to be found in the one competition that involves everyone: the Heineken Cup. When the quarter-finals are played this weekend – the most eagerly-awaited weekend of the season for the union connoisseur – three Celtic sides, two Irish and one Welsh, will be involved. The English? They have Northampton, and no-one else. It is the country's worst performance in Europe since 1999, when, because of a mass boycott, they failed to perform at all.

The Magners League was once dismissed as a joke by those living south of Hadrian's Wall and east of Offa's Dyke. They had a point. The tournament was frequently distorted by waves of disinterest sweeping in from Ireland, where everything was geared to performance at European and full international levels, and weakened by Scottish teams incapable of beating anyone but each other. During the middle years of the last decade, there were always more English teams than Celtic ones to be found in the knock-out stage of a Heineken Cup.

That is not the case any more. Last season, Ireland and Wales both sent two sides through to the last eight, with England managing only three. This season, the differential has grown. When Mark McCafferty, the chief executive of Premier Rugby, reflects on this in public, he puts it down to a "blip", albeit a blip that must be watched closely by those on radar duty. Privately, he knows that the concentration of talent in the provincial-district-regional set-ups of Ireland, Scotland and Wales, allied to the greater financial muscle of the French clubs, is impacting on English fortunes in cross-border rugby.

Hence the stresses and strains within the Premiership community, where the likes of Northampton and Leicester feel the musketeerish "all for one and one for all" approach – salary caps, financial equalisation and the rest of it – has had its day. They favour the unfettered free market and to hell with the level playing field, arguing that while a rugby economy can go either up or down, it goes nowhere on the flat.

The French, generally the most successful of the six Heineken Cup nations, are set to grow more powerful now Toulon and Racing-Metro 92 have joined the traditional big spenders. But it is the upturn in Celtic fortunes that most alarms the Premiership clubs. In this season's Heineken Cup pool stage, English sides won only seven of 20 contests with Magners League opponents.

"As a coach, the games you welcome most are the tough, close games," said Tony McGahan, the Australian who took over the reins at Munster when Declan Kidney was appointed to the Ireland job in 2008. "In this respect, the standard of the Magners League has improved dramatically. You can see evidence of that improvement when you look at what is happening in the Heineken Cup. It's difficult to get to the back end of a competition like the Heineken unless you're able to play in different styles and handle different environments. Those are exactly the demands increasingly placed on teams in our league."

Another, more celebrated man of Munster – the grand Irish lock Paul O'Connell, who led the Lions in South Africa last summer – can be heard singing from the same hymn sheet. O'Connell was one of those who, a few years back, could be guaranteed to miss half a dozen Celtic matches at the start of a campaign. He doesn't miss them any more.

"It's grown tougher by the season and now we've introduced a play-off system that will allow teams to make a meaningful challenge for the title while contributing players to their national sides, it will only increase in stature," he said. O'Connell, nursing an injury, had just watched a Munster-Leinster derby played in front of 26,000 people at something close to Test pitch. At its best, Premiership rugby can be every bit as good. Unfortunately, it can no longer claim to be better.

11
The number of years since English clubs performed this badly in the Heineken Cup.

Peter Bills: Ofcom decision highlights financial precariousness of English rugby

Peter Bills: Ofcom decision highlights financial precariousness of English rugby

If you take heed of the cries of anguish from sports bodies like the Rugby Football Union, last week's announcement by Ofcom, the communications regulator, that Sky Sports will have its wings clipped in a financial sense over TV rights, is a disaster.

The result of a 3-year enquiry by Ofcom into Sky's domination over sports rights in British television has concluded that it is charging others far too much for access. The regulatory body announced in a report that such a position of dominance of the market and the tariffs it sets for others to gain access is no longer tenable. Cuts of up to 23 per cent have been proposed.
Of course, this has rung alarm bells in places like Twickenham where negotiating vast TV fees with BSkyB for coverage of the English game has become an assumed right. Perish the thought that a nasty regulatory body like Ofcom, more interested in the consumers and what they are being forced to pay for such a service, might come along and wreck a very cosy, beneficial arrangement.

For the fact is, even in a country like England where the population has ballooned close to 65 million and where hundreds of thousands of young people play the sport, professional rugby still cannot pay its own way. Twickenham may wave balance sheets at critics like myself and say sneeringly "Look at us; we're creaming it."

They may be, but look at a club even as successful as London Wasps, past Heineken and Guinness Premiership champions and home to a multitude of international coaches - Ian McGeechan, Warren Gatland, Shaun Edwards - not to mention a host of big name international players. A booming business? Wasps are seeing crowds down by anything between 1,500 and 2,000 each time they play. Season ticket holders are quietly slipping away, content to buy tickets for the occasional game now rather than pay for every match.
Of course, some of this is to do with the world's worst recession for 80 years. But top class rugby's struggle to pay its own way and run as a successful business long pre-dates the recession.

What has masked the problems of all the English clubs, where losing anything between 1 and 2 million pounds a season is considered the norm, has been two factors; one, the wealthy individual benefactors who have become owners and lost tens of millions collectively over the years since 1995 when the game went professional and secondly, the TV money. Without that, the whole ship would have capsized years ago.

No wonder Francis Baron, Chief Executive of the RFU, rushed to the airwaves this week to denounce the Ofcom decision and warn of the consequences to several sports, rugby included. The game is petrified of seeing a reduction in the money BSkyB will pay to the RFU for TV rights. Twickenham knows that no-one else would pay anything like as much and a reduction in the fees would be catastrophic for Twickenham and the English clubs. Furthermore, Baron's contract to pay the money to the Premier clubs has 7 years to run.

The only trouble was, the man from Twickenham was economical in furnishing his listeners with certain other relevant facts. Of course, it hardly takes a genius to see that if BSkyB are unable to go on charging their rivals such inflated fees for access to their sports rights, that loss will be passed on to governing bodies like the RFU.

But what Baron did not mention, was the amount of wasted money at Twickenham itself and, by inference, the English clubs. Consider, for example, the sum of £100 million, the amount the RFU is giving the English clubs over an 8-year period to help shore up businesses which still cannot stand on their own economic feet, after 15 years of professionalism.

And where has the lion's share of that money gone? To pay for a glut of overseas players who have come into the English game, trousered vast salaries and denied places in the English Premiership club teams to countless numbers of aspiring young English players.
If Baron is sincere about his guardianship of the game's money, why did he not summon his lawyers last year when it became clear that the Premier owners had, allegedly, conspired to divert this £100 million, intended to guarantee the flow of young English talent into the England squad, into their own private clubs and pockets.

This flood tide of overseas players has significantly reduced the number of players available for the England team. Thus, the national side has suffered failure after failure since that famous World Cup triumph seven long years ago. Since then, England has won nothing and continues to look as though they're going to win nothing for another seven years.

Yet the thought of insisting most of that £100 million focuses on the English game, doesn't occur to Twickenham. It has been happy to sit back and see it disappear out of the game in the pockets of Samoans, Tongans, New Zealanders, South Africans, Australians, Argentinians and such like.
The wailing in anguish and gnashing of teeth from people like Baron is because they can see their own profit margins taking a hit because of the Ofcom decision. No wonder he revealed RFU lawyers are studying the judgement with a view to a legal challenge. But perhaps Twickenham would do better to study its own spending habits and make savings there.
For sure, there are plenty to be made.