Rhys with an H wrote:When the dragons with Rodney Parade got bought out by the WRU was this the chance to go to the NRFC to put in a cheeky bid to buy them out with the Dragons by our side? Club Rugby is sadly dead in Newport . History aside and all that.... Newport has a future we just need a cunning plan. Mr Blackadder Sir.......
Realistically, and sadly, what you propose couldn't have happened.
- The Newport RFC part of the rugby operation was only separate from the Dragons in theory (both were joined at the hip by RP Ltd, with the Dragons part already owned 50% by the WRU, IIRC).
- The RP board only wanted to sell to a buyer interested in carrying on rugby. Given Dragons 50% owned by WRU at that point, selling to a primary rugby owner was only ever the realistic outcome. (Strange, really, considering all the paper talk was about the WRU wanting to make Dragons a development region and moving the franchise north, or wherever.)
- We didn't have the cash to buy the ground (which included the rugby debt and the then future groundworks, which were part of the purchase price). If at that point we'd had around £10m in the bank (the near true cost of purchasing RP) it might have been worth a pop to see what they'd really have done about only wanting to sell to a "rugby owner". But if we'd had £10m in the bank at that point we'd probably have been in the process of building our own ground anyway.
