There has been little joy swirling around English rugby in the plast few years with chaos in the corridors of power and turgid displays on the pitch, but that is about to change if new RFU chief executive Ian Ritchie has his way.
The former lawyer, who gave up a comfortable job as head of Wimbledon tennis championships to take on the far stiffer challenge of running the world's biggest, and most tortuously tangled, rugby union, wants to inject some fun into it.
"The most important thing, and I've said this to the staff, is that this is going to be fun," Ritchie, 58, told a media briefing at Twickenham four days after starting the job.
"I am really looking forward to this. We are all involved in sport and in rugby because we think it's going to be fun. I can't tell you how much I enjoyed Saturday (when England lost an entertaining Six Nations encounter with Wales).
"It was a brilliant occasion, fantastic to watch the team perform the way they did and to watch the crowd reaction. This is meant to be fun and I regard it as such," he added.
"Despite all the serious stuff that happens and has gone on before, this is meant to be enjoyable. That doesn't mean you're not professional or committed or can ignore difficult decisions but underlining it all is that this is a game and it's meant to be fun."
Ritchie cuts something of an avuncular figure but the former head of Channel 5 TV is clearly a sharp operator with a real passion for sport.
He spent seven years on the board of the Football League and another three on the board of Wembley stadium, while in his seven years as chief executive of Wimbledon he achieved commercial success while maintaining the championships' traditional values.
He said he was drawn to the challenge of leading one of the most dysfunctional controlling bodies in world sport, where sections steeped in more than a century of amateur ethos still often struggle to find a way to work harmoniously with others more attuned to the professional era.
As if the endless in-fighting, power struggles and battles with the clubs were not enough to deal with, Ritchie has come on board in the wake of a World Cup campaign that left England's reputation in tatters in terms of performance and behaviour.
"Clearly there have been some interesting times in the last few months and my focus is how we move things forward," he said with a wry smile.
"I really don't want to dwell too much on things that have happened in the past. It's happened, you learn from it and move things forward."
Far from fearing the chaos that swirls around Twickenham, Ritchie said it was the reason he tore himself away from his "wonderful job" a few miles up the road at Wimbledon.
"I'm really looking forward to it," he said. "There are challenges of course but it would be boring if there weren't.
"But there are opportunities and one of the main reasons I wanted to take this job is that I think the RFU is in fundamentally a good place.
"The stadium, the commercial opportunities, the playing team, involvement in the sport - all of them are there and the underlying fundamentals are extremely positive," he said.
"I have a particular style and at the age of 58 I'm not about to change it. I don't do sophisticated or complex - I do simple, I find that's what usually works best."
