Richards should not be held to blame if price he is paying is not high enough

They missed the point by a long way. Worcester, in the shape of their long-suffering and highly-respected owner Cecil Duckworth, only gave Richards a job because the Rugby Football Union had approved the appointment.

Richards, who has a young family, has the right to earn a living and is not doing too badly – he could speak at a club dinner every night of the year if he were so inclined, which he is not – and the few bob he made from his assessment of the way relegated Worcester have been run will have paid the bills.

If any mistakes were made during this storm in a thimble they were made at Twickenham, where the head of the RFU's disciplinary body, Judge Jeff Blackett chose to ignore the demands of the International Rugby Board – the body responsible for the game world-wide and one whose rulings are usually adhered to without question by Twickenham – and let Richards enjoy his little earner.

The IRB pronounced when the whole sordid business of blood capsules, slits in mouths and attempts at a cover-up had been exposed that: "There is no room for such conduct in rugby. The IRB operates a zero-tolerance towards cheating of any form in the game."

We will not discuss here and now how that pompous stance equates to the IRB openly tolerating (even promoting) crooked feeding of the scrum – a form of cheating which has now become obligatory at the professional end of the game.

Instead we must ask why Blackett, who acted so soundly in his treatment of the Saracens' coach Brendan Venter – given a touchline ban after being found guilty of attempting to incite crowd trouble at a match and as a result sat out his club's Premiership final defeat against Leicester on Saturday – chose to play the maverick in the case of Richards.

Perhaps he was reflecting, albeit unconsciously, the widespread feeling at the grass-roots level of the game that Richards is carrying the can for lack of fibre in our top level club rugby; he was the unlucky one in that he was caught, almost literally red-handed.

You can be sure of one thing – unless the lunatic tendency have their way – that as soon as his three-year sentence is over, Richards will be welcomed back into English rugby, openly, well-rewarded and quite rightly.

He brought shame on the game, but he is paying the price; if that price is not quite as high as was originally intended then he is not the one to blame.

IT was one of those weekends which did not start well, what with rain all the way to Catterick then, after a splendid lunch, the disappointment of three losers from three investments and rather later the indignity of the Eurovision Song Contest.

Things did not look like improving yesterday afternoon, our pop-gun attack struggling against Bangladesh, our footballers being outplayed for much of the game by Japan and our racing-drivers put in their place by the Red Bull pair of Mark Webber and Sebastian Vettel.

There was not much solace in surfing the channels: the Giro d'Italia was inertia on wheels (if that is possible); the French Open tennis was soporific; the prospect of watching Bradford Bulls v Warrington Wolves, England's plodders against a less-than-inspiring Barbarians or even (in a moment of total desperation) turning to the Edinburgh Sevens was to write off the afternoon.

But mood swings can only take minutes. First we had Webber and Vettel, with the race in their grasp, amateurishly colliding and presenting a one-two to McLaren's Lewis Hamilton and Jenson Button.

Then, after Frank Lampard had missed (another) penalty, we had the eager-to-please Japanese gifting our lads two own-goals to secure victory in a game which had, until then, been remarkable only for the competition between Fabio Capello and his opposite number Takeshi Okada to see which of them won their personal inscrutability contest.

Finally Steven Finn managed to take a couple of wickets at sunny Lord's and roused at least half the sparse crowd from their post-lunch siesta.

It is amazing how sport – and with it the weekend – can turn out better than appeared possible but we really must get out more.

MENTION the name Sir Ronnie Flanagan in most county cricket dressing rooms this week and the likelihood is that you will be met with blank faces, a situation which is not going to last long if alarming allegations about bribery in cricket are any guide.

Sir Ronnie, whose knighthood came for his service as head of the police force in Northern Ireland, is chairman of the International Cricket Council's anti-corruption unit and the man charged with rooting out players who take money to influence the outcome of matches.

He could do worse than talk initially to Michael Vaughan, who has suggested, quite logically, that the senior professionals at county level are the most vulnerable to illegal approaches.

They have enormous influence in the dressing room and might be tempted, as their career draws to a close, to take a risk for a substantial nest-egg.