BEING a military man, Captain Tony Hallett (RN retired) should have known the folly of fighting on two fronts. For the English Rugby. Football Union (RFU), the ghastly prospect of losing not only its leading clubs but also. its neighbouring unions may become a virtual reality.

This is not what Hallett signed up for when he accepted the RFU shilling and left the service to succeed Dudley Wood as secretary. If only it were as simple as commanding a destroyer, he could be excused for thinking. Destroyer? Ouch.

Up there in his well appointed cabin at Twickenham, a day isn't the same without some new crisis. Tomorrow the one with the clubs could well become terminal. And lest we forget, the English are on the brink of being drop kicked of the Five Nations as well.

As things stand, there is as little chance of resolving how professional club rugby in England is to be financed and administered as there is in eradicating mad cow disease. For BSE and CJD read RFU. After last Friday's inconclusive meeting the clubs let it be known that this Friday's would be make or break. Now it has turned into a meeting of the full RFU committee all 61 of them and all the evidence makes it more likely to be break.

So attention must turn to what happens then, after the great breakaway, and an inexorable logic is at work which it is quite conceivable to see culminating in England's being represented in a revamped Five Nations competition by an alternative, non RFU team.

The other home unions are so fed up with English cupidity the very sin of which the union accuses the clubs that they could feasibly bring themselves to deal with an alternative to the RFU, which has in effect, been given a month to abandon its policy of seeking a television contract separate from the rest.

You need only examine the state of relations between England and its uneasy partners in the Five Nations to see how tempting this retort to a century of perceived arrogance would be. As an otherwise pleasant day in Dublin for first Saturday's Peace Match confirmed, everyone but everyone is sick to death of the Rugby Football Union.

Jack Rowell, the England manager, has been fond of emphasising (as explanation and, sometimes, excuse) the importance of an even longer history when his team face up to insurgent Scots, Welsh or Irish, and the antipathy between English and French rugby is among the game's defining features in the 1990s.

But Rowell could never have imagined that the on field antiEnglishness with which he is familiar would be so precisely emulated off the field too. The RFU, for which this season has been an endless strategic and tactical calamity, held a hostage to fortune with its insistence on opting out of the joint Five Nations television negotiations, and their Welsh, Scottish and Irish counterparts are demanding as ransom. that the English abase themselves by backing down.

If present positions are maintained, the other four nations France included will proceed with plans for a new home and away tournament without England from next season when the BBC's contract is in the last of its three years. And as if the RFU's pariah status were not enough, it is then perfectly possible that the big English clubs, by. then seceded from the governing body, would seek to either a team of their own so as to re-form the Five Nations' Championship.

Remember, the First Division players headed by Phil de Glanville and Lawrence Dallaglio have already pledged their allegiance, in the event of a split, to the leading clubs represented by English Professional Rugby Union Clubs Ltd (EPRUC), and self evidently would also want international rugby both for financial reasons and for its own sake.

This has been made explicit within the past fortnight by the England lock Martin Bayfield, who says that players of his ilk would not stand idly by if they were not participating in the championship and would get on with organising their own team. It's not as if player/union relations have any recent history of cordiality, and one can clearly see a move such as postulated by Bayfield fitting rather neatly into EPRUC's schemes.

In the meanwhile, the pre-agonists can only wait for tomorrow but not hope, since every time there has been optimism it has gone unrequited. England, or rather English rugby as represented by the RFU, faces meltdown. For New England, on the other hand, the rest of the world awaits.