Q: Going back to the Paris ticket pricing issue, do you think that England tickets against teams like Canada too high? Also can England win the next World Cup?

ME: I’ll take the second answer first – no, they haven’t got a hope. England just don’t have enough good players at the moment, I think England are going through a cyclical trough. It’s nothing to do with coaches, or the premiership, or central contracts, or rest periods, or training days and all that nonsense, they just don’t have enough good players at the moment. I think you’d find it impossible to name five world class English players at the moment. If you haven’t got 5 or 6 or 7 world class players in your team you’re very unlikely to win the World Cup.

Are the tickets for Twickenham overpriced? The marketers would say they are under-priced otherwise you wouldn’t have a black market. They would say if you put them on general sale and charged twice as much they would still sell out. 

Q: Do you think the gate should go to the lesser country? 

ME: The away team do not get any of the gate, there is no sharing of the gate in international rugby per se. That’s why the morally disgraceful rape of the South Sea Islands continues unabated. 

Q: Should they get the gate then? 

ME: I think they should get a significant percentage, a couple of hundred thousand or half a million goes a long way in Samoa. There are going to be 82000 seats in that stadium, average ticket price about £65, son that means about £4.2 million on the gate, another million in food and drink sales at 21% so they’ll clear £5M a game, oh plus the £50M they’ve just raised in selling debentures in the South Stand. They’re not short of a bob or two. So I think the way England and the other rich nations have treated the likes of Romania, Samoa, Tonga, Fiji, Canada etc over the years has been nothing short of a disgrace. When I hear about them getting up on their hind legs and talking about spreading the game globally it just makes me want to vomit quite frankly. 

Q: How are the gates shared in this league? 

ME: There’s no gate sharing in any English sport that I am aware of. They used to share it in the football Premiership when Burnley and Ipswich could win it. Now the big clubs don’t only get to keep the gate they also get a disproportionate amount of the TV money. But that’s the way the national game is structured, so we all know that only three teams can win it. 

Q: Will the Natal Sharks be coming back again this year? 

ME: We tried to get them back and hold a four team tournament but we couldn’t find a date, but I don’t think it’s quite going to come off which is a shame because it fitted quite well in our schedule this year which is unusual. We have secured the three England U19 games which will be played here before the Six Nations games, I think that will be a lot of fun. And we’re talking to one or two other teams at the moment, but they’re not actually finalised yet. At the moment I’d say it’s 90:10 against the Sharks game.

[Since the MTM Evening it has been announced that NEC Harlequins will be playing Manu Samoa on Wednesday 23rd November, full details are here]

Q: What are the plans for the South Stand?

ME: I’d like to build one, not personally of course [laughs], I’m not very good at that, Dean’s much better at it, he builds houses and things. I would like to get something up by the Summer of 2007, but it’s not certain yet. 

Q: Will the South Stand remain empty all season?

ME: We can take 10,000 in the rest of the ground, if we get more we’ll open it, but I think it’s unlikely, it’s not closed because it’s not usable or anything like that. Rather than have 6 or 7,000 spread out over four stands, it’s better to have them in three because of the atmosphere, feel, general organisation and cost.

The Boxing Day game against London Welsh might be our biggest gate just because of when it is on, if that looks like it it’s going to go north of 10,000 we’ll open the South Stand. And we’ll certainly have it open when we go back to the Premiership.

Q: Talking about London Welsh is it true that they want to move the fixture here?

ME: I don’t know where that came from, I cannot see you can do that and keep the integrity of the league with a home and away principal. I can see why they would like to do it financially but no one’s approached me so I don’t think there’s anything in it. I doubt very, very much if the League would let them do it, you’d say it was an unfair advantage to Harlequins.

In the next report we hear how Mark Evans signed Dean Richards...

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