Back in the day spectators used to clamber up the floodlight pylons at the Gnoll to get a better view because the terraces were so packed. Now, as Neath faces a winding-up order on Thursday for failing to repay a £30,000 loan taken out to cover wages, the lights may go out for good on Wales’s oldest club.
Neath are due to entertain Llanelli on Friday night, a fixture that not long ago would have been a highlight of any club weekend. It will be preceded by a bash for supporters in the clubhouse, but if the court hearing goes against a club whose nickname has long been the Mourners, it would turn into a wake.
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It was only 32 years ago that the Gnoll was full beyond its capacity for the match against Bath in what was unofficially billed as a British championship decider. There were no turnstiles in those amateur days when health and safety were mere words. No one knew how many got into the ground for a contest won decisively by a Jonathan Davies-inspired Neath.
The crowds have gone, their roar a faint echo. Welsh club rugby dwells in the shadow of regional rugby which, 15 years from its inception, has yet to replicate the resonance of a domestic game that was clotted with local rivalries. Well might Aneurin Bevan have once said, “Politics in Westminster are in their infancy compared to Welsh rugby.”
In its heyday Wales had 18 first-class clubs, along with London Welsh, who had dual membership of the English and Welsh unions and a position on the general committee of the latter. Eight of them are not in this season’s 16-strong Welsh Premiership, the likes of Pontypool, Newbridge and Maesteg, who went through the 1949-50 season unbeaten but dropped two divisions this campaign after only five players turned up to pre-season training, fading from view.
Neath, founded in 1871, are set to join them. Even if the club survives its date in court, its league position looks hopeless: marooned at the bottom, 13 points from safety in a season when four clubs go down after yet another reorganisation of the Premiership, and a number of players have left after their wages were not paid.
Mike Cuddy, the director of Neath Rugby Limited, has vowed the club will continue, even if it plummets down the divisions. He was involved at the start of regional rugby, helping form Ospreys when Neath and Swansea worked together, and took control at the Gnoll, where he had been involved pre-2003, three years ago after a boardroom battle ended in court.
The protracted battle saw Neath, who have won the league a record seven times, slide down the table, but problems escalated when Cuddy was taken ill in 2016. He spent six months in hospital and his demolition business collapsed earlier this year, which was why he took out a loan to help pay the players.
Premiership clubs get little more than spare change from central funds and with crowds low, club turnover is a fraction of that of a region, even an unsuccessful one. Neath hired Lyn Jones, the former Ospreys, London Welsh and Dragons head coach as a consultant this year but he left to take charge of Russia following their World Cup qualification and among the players recruited was the former New Zealand centre Regan King.
It was a desperate attempt to catch the Premiership champions Merthyr, who are bankrolled by millionaire Stan Thomas, and it backfired. The abrupt exodus of players last month forced Neath to postpone last week’s fixture at Bedwas because they could not raise a side. King could be found on Saturday playing for Skewen against Waunarlwydd in a lower league match, Neath’s way of thanking a club that had helped them out with loans – of players.
Neath supporters met last week. They hoped Cuddy would attend, but ill health meant he sent them a statement that said the summer recruitment policy failed because the majority of the “expensive and under-performing players did not understand our values or have the club at heart … It made us the most expensive and by some distance the worst performing side in the league.”
He said that, facing a loss this year of £250,000 and having put in £500,000 himself, he had to delay wages and other payments while he conducted a business review of the club. Neath’s bank account was frozen, which he was trying to overturn so “we will then continue to fund, at a much lower level, a core of loyal contracted and permit players in order to fulfil this season’s fixtures. I am also seeking to negotiate and settle valid claims against the club. It is my intention to rebuild Neath, in its present company structure, from a lower division for it once again to be successful.”
Supporters want change. They were joined this week by the owners of the Gnoll, Neath Port Talbot council, which leases the ground to the Welsh Rugby Union, which sublets it to Neath. “There is a proud history of rugby at the Gnoll, but we cannot go on like this,” said a spokesperson. “Neath RFC has lurched from one set of financial problems to the next over many years and it is time for a fresh start. It is clear that the current structure is not going to achieve that and we want to see the club put on a much firmer financial and operational footing going forward in the interests of the town and the wider community.”
There is little chance of the WRU intervening, as it did in 1998 when the club was collapsing under a £600,000 debt, not least because it cannot afford to. Yet, as the former Neath and Wales captain Paul Thorburn told Wales Online: “Neath, like Pontypool, is a rugby town. Clubs like that should never be allowed to fall by the wayside. They are a community asset. The Union need to step in and ensure that the game and its rockbed, and that includes the Premiership clubs, are controlled in a manner that ensures those clubs won’t ever go out of business.”
It seems perverse in an era when a few players are receiving seven-figure salaries that the future of one of rugby’s most famous clubs is threatened by a £30,000 debt. Professional sport should not be detached from the past: history is a gift to the present. If your father was born in Neath, like his father and grandfather, sentiment comes into it, but who gains if Neath disappear?
It may not be down to health and safety officers that the floodlights at the Gnoll are no longer adorned by spectators, but they should remain a symbol of what a small town in south Wales has contributed to the game.
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