What has gone wrong with the English game’s finances, he asks?
Why are the rules around the tackle height so confusing, he wonders, especially when the eyes of the world are on France?
In a way he can count himself lucky. Boden is employed by a club that bucks the English trend of over-spending and over-reaching.
Doncaster Knights are a byword for sustainability. They are blessed to have wealthy benefactors in Steve Lloyd and Tony De Mulder, but they are not gluttonous. For years they have built up their Castle Park home to represent one of the finest rugby venues in the north of England.
While Rotherham Titans and Yorkshire Carnegie went to the brink of oblivion, Doncaster have survived and adapted and are set to embark on their 10th straight year in English rugby’s second tier.
Last year, three Premiership clubs in Wasps, Worcester and London Irish went to the wall and nothing is being done about it.
“The game needs to get smart,” says Boden, at the start of his fourth year as Doncaster’s director of rugby. “You’re still hearing stories now of lads who are fifth-, sixth-choice at their clubs who wouldn’t start for our team but are on six-figure salaries in the Premiership. And then we’re wondering why the game’s unsustainable.
“We’re getting obsessed with trying to compete with France and we’re just not going to do it.
“The Premiership salary cap this year is £5m and they’re talking about getting it put back up to £6.5m the year after.
“Some of these French clubs are spending close to £20m, so even if you push it up to £6.5m, which the English clubs cannot afford, you’re still nowhere near.
“So why don’t we concentrate on making the English game as strong as possible?
“The governing body has a lot to answer for. We’re still waiting for answers on a lot of things.
“Something has gone wrong that needs putting right. I’m not the man to do it but there are people that have gone very quiet that need to do something about it.”
If the Rugby Football Union were inclined to ask him, Boden would suggest a Premiership 1 and a Premiership 2, with more equal funding between the two divisions.
Right now, Premiership clubs get £2m compared to £160,000 for clubs in the Championship.
“It used to be £600,000,” he laments. “They’ve just been slowly but surely strangling the second tier. It’s starting to show now at the top because the pathway is struggling.”
He continues: “There’s a lot to answer for across the game: there’s a lot of red cards that need explaining.
“We need diversity, people coming to watch the game from all aspects of life. They’ll be wondering what’s this card for?
“World rugby has a lot to do about player welfare and brain injuries, but then again it’s part of the beauty of our sport; the high-impact, the danger. We want to protect players but if it gets to the point where all these red cards are coming out, I don’t know what game is going to be left.”
Increasingly it feels that a club like Doncaster is on an island, cut off from the realities of the game and the support of the governing body. So for the 19th year out of the last 20, they begin a second-tier season facing a mountain to climb to reach the Premiership.
They have nearly done so a couple of times, most recently two years ago. If they want to this year they have to win a league in which Ealing Trailfinders spent some £3m more than them on player salaries, then pass an audit that requires a 5,000 capacity which they have with planning permission for 10,001, which they achieved last year, and then win a two-legged play-off against the team that finishes bottom of the Premiership.
“The million dollar question everyone asks is do you want to get into the Premiership?” says Boden who saw 20 players leave and 19 come in this summer.
“We’d love to, we’ve done everything the right way; we’ve got a facility and we just spend money on players well within our budget until it becomes feasible for us to push.
“There’s no point us spending £3m on players this year when there’s no answers from the governing body.
“We’d love to win the league, we’d love to be in the Premiership, but we’re building; we’ve got a great facility, we’re trying to build a fanbase and make our business sustainable while trying to play an exciting brand of rugby which people from Yorkshire want to get behind. Once you’re sustainable you’re in a position where you can really grow.”
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