Each season as the clubs are promoted and relegated it brings new or different opponents with many club treasurers keen to establish how their travel budgets affect the overall cost of the club in getting to their opponents to play there allocated fixtures. During the close season with limited rugby to watch fans and players alike can be found discussing the relative merits of playing national league rugby. The furthest distance travelled by a National league 1 or 2 club is Plymouth Albion at 4038 and the shortest distance is 1316 from Sale FC. Broadstreet RFC rank 33rd with just over 1700 miles to travel in 2015.
The RFU apparently intent on making changes to the structure claiming benefits of more local derbies, better exposure for regional sponsors to reduce their own budgets and revert to a more local rugby fixture list.
Fans of the Rolling Maul rugby forum can often be found at the end of the season discussing distance travelled with those clubs at the extreme of the country taking the most pain both in cost of travel and time travelling before a game. Then there is the cost to the fans of the club, however the feedback from the majority is that National means national and the clubs playing in these leagues want to play rugby at the highest level possible. The cut off from the RFU is a 500 miles round trip in a day which leaves the clubs like Plymouth Albion, Redruth and Cornish All Blacks in the South, and Blaydon, Wharfdale and Darlington Moden Park.
The Clubs Want One thing, The RFU Management Committee want another!
The RFU appears keen to implement National 2 at 3 regions, reducing the traveling burden on the clubs and themselves, creating more local fixtures. Longer distances are more prevalent in National 2 South with 32 fixtures > 500 miles if traveled in the 1 day. The North and Midlands only seeing 4 fixtures >500 Miles, however the feeling from the majority of clubs is that they wish to maintain the current structure.
We have put together some tables identifying the distance travelled between each of the clubs for information and reference. This information is extracted from a Google maps database by looking up between the two postcodes published for the clubs, collated and totaled.
