The end of rugby... as you know it

And now we come to what is, perhaps, the highlight of the season. With the boys' season over May gives us access to grounds impossible at any other time. As a result its festival time and even without Dorking this year we still have Worthing 10s, Herts 7s, and National 7s to look forward to. A month with two Bank Holidays also allow for teams across the country to get together so we should be renewing our friendship with teams like Darlington, Tynedale, Exeter, Newquay, and Waterloo. Excitement, variety, good weather (most of the time) hundreds of girls together, brilliant days, fantastic memories.

Well, make the most of it this year because - as things stand - it will never happen again.

The draft calendar for 2010-11 that appeared a few months ago showed the surprise move of the National 7s to  the early May Bank Holiday - a move that many of us thought was linked to the need to avoid clashes with events like Bournemouth Sevens which decimated entries to the adult event last year. But in a shock development yesterday RFUW issued a revised calendar which...

• Includes no mention of the Nationals Sevens (though there is an "Easter Sevens" for juniors only)
• Ends the season at the end of April
• States that - for insurance reasons - there must be NO club rugby in May AT ALL

The reason given is the need to bring the female season into line with the male so that there is a single game. However, admirable and understandable though this policy may be, it does seem to forget the reasons why the women's and girls' rugby season has a different structure which is, as suggested above, access to grounds. If women's and girls' teams can now look forward to equal access to pitches (Saturday afternoons and Sunday mornings respectively), full and equal funding of its county teams by CBs (and national team by RFU), the appearance of the national team's Six Nations games on TV, and so on then maybe but somehow I don't think that is going to happen.

What we are getting instead is the loss of probably all of our best tournaments, the highlight of our season, and all this on the back of fixture chaos from a rushed review of leagues (more on that later)