It angers me that I find myself having to send another email regarding a club calling off a game this coming weekend and fielding a lower level side at home again, I hope on this occasion that the Referee’s society will be withdrawing the official for this fixture and the club made aware of the consequences of playing a game without a qualified official.
On this occasion it is the Presidents own club, Holt, who for the second time this season are refusing to send a side to West Norfolk because they will not be strong enough and this after the Norfolk Society have set out guide lines on honouring fixtures and the President travelling the county and speaking at lunches with concerns about clubs calling off games at the drop of a hat, this tells me that the clubs in Norfolk don’t really listen to the guide lines set out by their own Constitutional Body and it make me wonder what other rules they ignore!
This angers me further as we travelled to Holt last weekend as they had had another side call off against them and at the time they assured us that they would travel to us this weekend, perhaps we should of thrown the game so they would think they could travel to West Norfolk and win because that’s the impression we are getting that sides will not travel to us to get beaten, if all clubs took this attitude the game would disappear completely and at this level it’s not all about winning it’s about playing a sport that you have a passion for and the camaraderie that goes with it.
This after Wisbech 2nd’s failed to turn up last Saturday, another weekend with no rugby at home. Our second team has not played rugby on 2 consecutive weekends this season that is how bad it has got.
This has got to be stopped because we are in real danger of loosing good quality player to other sports. It is not fair on those players that have paid a reasonable amount of money to play a sport and are unable to so, these people make their weekends available and other clubs seem to ignore this.
If you as a club have players that are not committed to the sport and find yourselves unable to field the number of sides that you have entered into the leagues you need to consider dropping a side, but that side needs to be the lowest side that you run and travel with 20 players rather than leave 18 players without a game!!!
The most worrying thing about these events is the knock on effect it is starting to have, clubs that are calling of at senior levels are now starting to do the same at youth and mini levels and this really will kill the sport.
I think it has got to a stage when the county has got to implement some form of fine or a bond of say a £1000.00 given at the beginning of the season that will be returned at the end according to the number of games called off and the amount deducted sent to the clubs that have suffered so refunds can be made to players that have not had value for money rugby.
We as one would be happy with this as we are confident of honouring our ALL fixtures.
