Santa O'Reilly brings ideal gift

This being the week that's in it, comparisons between Santa Claus and Dr Tony O'Reilly are hard to resist. Likewise the notion that the four Home Unions could raise anything between a quarter and a half a billion just like that would hardly appear more fanciful were the cheques delivered via the chimney by the white bearded one.

The proposed "securitisation" of the Home Unions' essential assets - effectively mortgaging hard assets such as advertising, broadcasting and sponsorship among a wide range of institutional investors - seems almost too good to be true, and the wonder is nobody thought of it before.

Amid all the trumpeting, as the IRFU President Billy Lavery stated, the scheme is still in its infancy. Similarly, the RFU's chief executive Francis Barron observed that "it's not a Christmas gift. These city people are hard-nosed businessmen and they will want a return. Their conditions might be draconian. I can see difficulties in selling forward all rights for a lump sum today. Who is going to invest that money and how? Mess that up and you're bust. Let's reserve judgement."

Reaction to O'Reilly's brainchild varied across the water largely according to which stable an English newspaper belonged, and not unsurprisingly those belonging to O'Reilly's were generally more gung-ho than their rivals.

By comparison, The Guardian, sister paper of The Observer (which was comparatively left out in the cold by Saturday's announcement) was strikingly more muted. They maintained that city financiers were reacting coolly to the proposal, and unless the sport could guarantee future revenue sources, prospective investors such as pension fund operators and insurance companies would be unlikely to back the initiative.

The Guardian quoted a rival corporate financier as saying: "The investment community would want evidence of a more unified and stable approach by the unions. "Securitisation" means just that - investors expect security."

Presumably, the "securitasation", or so-called Lion Bonds, would be secured on assets such as the four Home Unions' principal stadiums at Lansdowne Road, Twickenham, Murrayfield and Cardiff. Hence, were the unions to default on the bonds issue, the varied investors would hold rights over those grounds.

Furthermore, recent test cases with regard to the home unions' television rights twice nearly culminated in England being thrown out of the championship, and one wonders how unifying the French and Italians regard this latest British/Irish brainchild.

Against that, the proposal does have certain things going for it. For all the spiralling costs and internecine warfare between rival unions, and in England and Wales between their unions and their clubs, rugby continues to generate additional income through television and advertising via a burgeoning European Cup and, most of all, through the traditional golden egg that is the Six Nations Championship.

Furthermore, the proposal has apparently been given the imprimatur of Warburg Dillon Read, one of the world's leading investment banks, which sees £250 million from the bonds issue as a conservative estimate.

It is also encouraging that sport has been down this road before, and it must also assuredly help the whole process that O'Reilly himself carries a certain kudos with him that few in the game possess. Aside from 29 caps for Ireland and 10 for the Lions, he has, you could say, cut his teeth in the business community.

However, he has also largely stayed on the periphery of the game, hence he is perceived as being unsullied by rugby's politics and feuding, while retaining the game's interests at heart.

Were O'Reilly's scheme ultimately realised, it would, at a stroke, provoke the most unifying effect within the home unions since the advent of professionalism four and a half years ago.

The financial benefits of the Lion Bonds scheme would be manifold. Most of all, it would give British and Irish rugby a level of financial security unbeknown to the game since it turned professional. The game would no longer be prey to a Rupert Murdoch-type takeover, and buoyed by the process of co-operation entailed in the complex "securitisation", a badly needed unified structure to the season might also come into effect.

There could, of course, be some bloodletting and trouble ahead, not least in the ongoing battle between Twickenham and its more hawkish club owner foes. Possibly however, this financial windfall might even unify those warring factions as well.

Hardly a week goes by without some scheme being offered up as the latest panacea for European rugby's ills in the professional era. With characteristic arrogance, they hail mostly from England and are touted as if everybody else is hardly entitled to an opinion. Then again, their need is the greatest.

However, the Lion Bonds scheme and the proposed cash injection would seem to sound the death knell for a proposed 16-team British League, as put forth by the owner of Gloucester, and motor racing millionaire, Tom Walkinshaw.

This scheme has been received warily by Twickenham and elsewhere anyhow, for it fails to specify where the mooted £85 million will come from, who will be the television partners, who will control the purse strings and who would have primacy of contract over the players.

Besides, in their brief and rumbustious association with the game, already leaving behind them a trail of debts, defunct clubs and grounds, the English club owners have done little to prompt trust in them.

The rival plan put forward by Rob Andrew's working party incorporates a structured season wherein an English League encompassing a dozen franchises jointly owned by the RFU and the club owners runs alongside Celtic and French Leagues, leading to a European Cup and then into the Six Nations run over consecutive weekends in April and May.

Therein lies the rub, for if rugby's recent history has shown anything, it is that the game toys with the Six Nations Championship at its peril. The championship is the traditional bedrock of the European game.

But however it all pans out, if rugby in these isles is to be brought together and underpinned by a £250-£500 million investment, then this latest development will easily be the most significant in rugby's teething stages of professionalism.