While agreeing with you (and Agnew) re regionalisation, it’s not quite correct to say that, back in the old days (and I’m talking mid-1970s backwards), there wasn’t support for county rugby. In fact, the County Championship was a big competition, with matches like Gloucestershire-Somerset, or any game involving Cornwall, drawing relatively big crowds. This was, of course, before the era of club cup and league rugby (which began in 1972 and 1987 respectively in England), and so the CC was the only proper competitive rugby tournament below international level. The competition which illustrates the point is what was known as the Divisional Championship, which ran in various formats from the late seventies to the mid-nineties and was played by teams ‘representing’ London, the South-West, the Midlands and the North. There was never any real interest in the games and they only seemed to exist as trial matches for international selection. But rugby then (in the final throes of shamateurism) was a very, very different animal from today’s game.