Last week was to have been a turning point in the salvation of European rugby. Some chance. The Six Nations met on Monday, and agreed to set up enough working parties (on issues ranging from the European Cup to a British League) to satisfy a week-long political party conference. Then the English Rugby Football Union Council met on Friday and conceded yet more ground to the militant English clubs by allowing them to run their own competitions, yet another climbdown to a clutch of club owners who seem hell bent on destroying not only their own clubs but also the game.

Every time it looks as if the Home Unions or the Six Nations appear to be on the same wavelength, Twickenham goes its own way.

It's been ever thus since the gates of professionalism were opened three seasons ago and the English RFU absolved itself of all responsibilities when it came to player professionalism and handed that responsibility over to the clubs.

The Scots and the Irish Unions, reactive rather than proactive, have managed to hold some of the control by contracting their districts and their provinces, but for the poor unfortunate Welsh the horse has also long since bolted. They are all over the place, broke and in bitter revolt.

Throughout all the game's off-field traumas in recent times, resulting in the vexed debate over a half-baked British League and the English clubs' boycott of the European Cup which starts this weekend, the English clubs' militancy and brazen willingness to hold the European game to ransom has been given tacit support from Twickenham. This has been a common thread, from Twickenham's breaking ranks and sell-out of home Five Nations games (thereby denying their Celtic cousins live terrestial coverage of Five Nations games for the first time ever), to the so-called Mayfair Agreement (included in which is a proposal to shift the Five Nations to an end-of-season date run over successive weekends) to last week's latest climbdown, and lots, lots more in between.

It won't stop there. The English club owners, along with like-minded souls at Cardiff and Swansea, are seemingly intent not only on having control of their own league, but also the oft-mooted British (and Irish?) League and even the European Cup.

One of their number, in true Thatcherite mode, recently said to me: "The Unions should relinquish control and let market forces apply." Quite. Indeed. Might is right. "We should be allowed play anybody we want whenever we want. It's the same in every other sport." Quite. So Manchester United can play in Serie A? "Yes, they can." Er, no they can't actually, and the day they can, football too is dead.

When individual club owners and television interests combined to try and set up a European Super League in football, UEFA responded accordingly. And they have to. There simply has to be control from the Unions under whose boundaries the competitions take place, be they national, British or European.

The basic problem in all of this, so far as I can determine, is that the English club owners have been living in the ultimate fool's paradise, funding a massive outlay on resources which cannot be financed by crowd attendances and television rights for the Allied Dunbar Premiership.

Great businessmen though Sir John Hall, Ashley Levett, Nigel Wray, Geoff Read and co seem to be, they don't seem to understand much about rugby. It is the international matches, and specifically the Five Nations Championship, which has funded rugby in the northern hemisphere, and always will do. It is not the English club game, or even the European club game, and never will be. And it is the Five Nations which Twickenham and the English clubs are undermining in the long-term for short-term financial gain.

The English clubs do have legitimate concerns about the chaotic structuring of the season and their comparatively poor representation in the European Cup. But their boycott has set not only European rugby but primarily themselves back. Surely a 50 per cent hike in money, with all travel expenses covered and the retention of all home gates, was a good deal?

Poor Swansea and Cardiff. By withdrawing they have cut off their noses despite their faces; the £400,000 appearance money alone was probably in the region of half their seasonal wage bill. One sincerely hopes the competition will be a success without them, though one fears that will only make the English clubs even more intransigent, for they are now in a corner of their own making.

The most revealing statistic from last weekend's second round of matches in the English league was the number of paying spectators.

Given the cumulative loss of over £15 million the season before last, and a projected loss of over £20 million last season, one might have expected that the average attendance at the six games was somewhere in the region of 15,000, or even 10,000. In fact, the aggregate attendance at the six games was 23,767, giving an average of 3,961. Yet the funding of the entire Scottishbased professional pool of 60 is believed to be less than the wage bill at several of the English Premiership clubs. How can the latter possibly sustain this?

Interestingly, since the Six Nations agreed that one of their working parties should look into the mooted British League, the response from the English clubs seems to have been suddenly lukewarm.

Could it be that it was all a ruse, a smokescreen to mask the unofficial inclusion of Swansea and Cardiff on their fixture lists, and so brazenly drive another wedge into the heart of Welsh rugby?

And what of London Irish in all of this? Time was when some of us thought that the English club game was the best place for our finest to go (admittedly, before the IRFU starting funding professionalised provinces), and that London Irish should enjoy an even more special relationship with the Irish game.

The underhand dismissal of Willie Anderson undermined that notion. So too did the flogging of Irish players on the Monday of an international match week. And, sure enough, by the time this season started off, the club would be Irish "in name only."

The team which beat West Hartlepool on Sunday contained only six Irish players. In total, the 14 English Premiership clubs used only 14 Irish players. The likes of Richie Wallace, Kevin Maggs, David Erskine and Eric Miller (in Leicester limboland) are currently out of favour, while Paddy Johns and Dion O'Cuinneagain are injured.

Good luck to London Irish, if that's their choice, for it's their prerogative. But it makes you wonder why they should even have access to Irish international match tickets any more, never mind Irish players.