ENGLAND will shortly fire a propaganda broadside at the home unions who have excluded them from the Five Nations Championship by putting the finishing, touches to a new gilt-edged international fixture list for 1997.
Plans by Wales, Scotland and Ireland to set up an alternative championship which were discussed at a meeting in London last night, will be heavily overshadowed by an annual world test series that brings England, South Africa, New Zealand, Australia, and France into regular competition.
The major rugby union nations have shied away from formally introducing an annual world championship which would have undermined the status of the World Cup held every four years. However, each nation, with rare exceptions, will play a minimum of two tests annually against all the others on a home and away basis. The television rights to each test outside the southern hemisphere's Tri-Nations series will be sold by the host union.
Despite the Rugby Football Union's exclusion from the Five Nations television committee meeting held near Heathrow, Twickenham has drawn a measure of comfort from Scotland's inclusion of the traditional Calcutta Cup match in their official fixture list for the new season. England believe they have a legal right under the current contract with the BBC - which they are willing to test in the courts - to participate in next year's Five Nations Championship but English concern about being consigned to an international noman's land has diminished sharply this month.
South Africa, the World Cup holders, are the latest nation to agree to play England on an annual basis irrespective of their participation in other competitions. In addition Namibia, Fiji and Western Samoa are virtually certain to figure in warm up matches against England whenever they embark on a relatively short trip to the southern hemisphere for a major test. In Europe, Italy are also expected to play England once a year.
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