National 10s: the story continues

Although protests continue to arrive at Twickenham, the latest responses I have seen appear to indicate a certain digging in of heels.

The current line is that "detailed statistics" indicate that the 10s was not as popular as we may have thought - apart from in certain regions. What those statistics are is not revealed, which is a pity as a) two out of the three regionals heats last season seemed to have a pretty good attendance, so the Northern heat (which I do not have data for) must have been a complete disaster (can you have a negative number of participants?); and b) if the stats for the 10s are poor one dreads to think what the stats for the National Cup look like - yet that event continues!

RFUW then go on to say that clashes with exams were a problem - which is unarguable, though presumably the solution to that would be to maybe not hold the competition in the middle of the exam season rather than cancelling the whole thing. Or am I missing something here?

Apparently RFUW are discussing all this on a number of rugby fora. Exactly which fora is unclear - certainly not the RFUW's own forum, nor this (despite the fact that there has been a flurry of log-ins from RFU.com addresses in the last couple of days - so they know we are here), nor Women's Rugby Review, nor... well any others in the UK top 10. If any of you do find which forum they are using please let us all know (not least because it'll probably be a site I have never heard of!)!

The bottom line is that at the minute HQ shows no sign of backing down. However as they have not actually officially announced anything about the cancellation yet there is room for manoeuvre if they wanted to take it, so please keep writing to them!

In the meanwhile a chink of light is that they say that the tournament might be "club run" instead of being run by RFUW, which is actually something we were already looking into... so watch this space - one way or another the 10s is not dead yet!

• Some strong support has now appeared on the RFUW Discussion List from Ian White, who some of you will know as the physio for East Region - so we are not alone (as is normally the claim whenever we complain about anything!).