"Nobody actually used the words 'peace in our time'...But that clearly was the intended message, and the profound hope." Huw Richards reports from Twickenham on English rugby's big new deal.

Nobody actually used the words 'peace in our time'. Even if nobody in the room was old enough to remember Neville Chamberlain, everyone at the Twickenham unveiling of the peace deal between the Rugby Football Union and Premier Rugby has very clear memories of the breakdown of previous agreements. But that clearly was the intended message, and the profound hope, from the seven men seated at the top table.

Tom Walkinshaw of Premier Rugby spoke dismissively of 'band-aid agreements'. This one has the scale of major invasive surgery, with 150 pages of detail intended to cover every conceivable contingency and provision for outside arbitration in the event of disagreement. Even the bullet points in the media presentation ran to 38 pages.

The air of weariness, expressed more clearly by Rob Andrew, was understandable. As he pointed out, the strife dates back to the summer of 1995 and he himself stood in much the same place eight years ago unveiling his own RFU commissioned vision for the future of the English game.

One must hope that the weariness does not extend to being sick of the sight of each other. Every man on the platform - Walkinshaw, Andrew, players union chief Damian Hopley, RFU chief executive Francis Baron, Mark McCaffrety of Premier Rugby, Peter Wheeler and RFU management board chair Martyn Thomas - will be on the Professional Game board created to oversee the elite game.

'Another committee - great' may be a natural reaction of many fans, but this one matters. It completes the long march of the leading clubs, begun back in the late 1960s with the creation of the Gate-Taking Clubs Association, from distrusted outsiders to the centre of power in the English game.

That distrust, leading to exclusion, and the subsequent battle for recognition has been the central fissure of the English game, particularly in the fraught years that followed the rush to professionalism and what Wheeler recalled as a time of fear and chronic uncertainty on all sides.

The RFU retains its safety blanket of the chairmanship - which will be taken for the first two years by Thomas - and its casting vote, albeit with limits on how it is used. One test of how well the new dispensation is working may be if, in two year's time, the RFU feels it is safe to appoint an independent chair.

The clubs have also seen off any suggestion of central contracts - they remain the primary employers, and can look forward to £110m from the RFU over the eight years from the start of the agreement in June 2008, an average of £1.146m each per season, in return for the release of players.

They have accepted automatic promotion and relegation between the Premiership and the First Division - abolition of which has long been proclaimed by some club voices as the prime prerequisite of the stability they needed - but there is little doubt that the criteria for promotion will only get tougher. McCafferty said :"If you want to be part of our league, you need to be making some serious investment."

Rob Andrew was insistent that there is now limited scope for disagreement on the amount of time players play each season, but there certainly looks to be plenty of scope in the 'nominated position' clause for squad players. Goodwill and good trust are likely to be tested where club and country requirements differ.

How it all works comes down ultimately to the same issues, trust and goodwill. If they really have been achieved, there can indeed be peace in our time. And if this is so, as one fellow journo suggested, shouldn't England be capable of conquering the world, given that it won the World Cup and reached the following final against a background of civil war ?

Andrew, sensibly, was not giving hostages to fortune. He's as aware as anybody that part of the appeal of sport is that it does not follow that sort of linear logic - an end to internal strife might instead have the outcome that England start to match the World Cup performances achieved by peaceful nations like New Zealand and Ireland.