Why Yesterday Could Be An Important Day For Welsh National Rugby....Because Of Cardiff City Football Club

Hello there. Hope you're feeling well today.

When big institutions are in danger. It's never because of some big almighty swipe that sends them reeling. No what happens are slow seemingly inconsequential actions that gradually weaken it so that when openly attacked it's too venerable to respond.

Yesterday in the first of the Autumn rugby internationals Wales beat Scotland 21-10 in the Principality (should go back to being called Millennium) stadium in Cardiff.

Meanwhile at roughly the same time Cardiff City football club lost to Leicester one nil in  the Cardiff City Stadium.

And the key words in the previous paragraph are "roughly the same time"

When I chat about rugby in this blog I almost acknowledge the fact that there are people more knowledgeable on the subject than I am. But I honestly can't recall this happening. I've chatted about the problems facing the clubs previously but potentially this is the first time where the status of the national side has (however quietly) need to be discussed.

South Walian football teams would normally avoid playing home fixtures when the national rugby team was playing. They knew that on an international level the pull of the team was great. The cliché, even when I moved to Wales in 1997 of Welsh people coming together to watch these games at home with friends or in the pub is true (and let me stress probably true for this game as well given that it was on free to air TV).

But for Cardiff City to have played a match at roughly the same time as the Wales rugby team, and if the pictures I saw on Match Of The Day are any guide did not appear to have hurt the Bluebirds in any way in terms of attendance suggests a change of mindset. The seeming deference to the national rugby side has, perhaps subconsciously, gone.

Why this change of mindset? I can only speculate. I've mentioned before that football not rugby is the nation's sport at a club level and perhaps it's permeated into the national side as well. But I really don't know.

Now I'm not saying that people didn't watch the Wales-Scotland game and for all I know Cardiff will be playing away for the rest of the autumn internationals and next year's six nations. However as I said at the top of the post powerful organisations need to careful with actions that chip away at it's authority. The Welsh Rugby Union would need to understand this or else in the future this weakening might continue until it's too late.

Until the next time.