Grass on foreign soil is not always greener

OPINION: Crowd sizes in France’s Top 14 league are falling.

Dan Carter trots out to average crowds of just 8863 at his Paris club Racing 92. That’s about half of what the Highlanders attracted last year, the best supported Kiwi franchise.

The Top 14 average is 12,824. The average crowd of the New Zealand Super Rugby sides last year was 15,332.

Even the Jaguares and Sunwolves averaged more than the Top 14 number.

That may surprise given the hype the French league attracts, but as Dan Carter has found out in his second year at Racing 92 it’s not all champagne and chocolates.

The critics can be ferocious, the media has far more teeth than here in New Zealand and the training methods can be novel to southern hemisphere athletes.

The whisper is that Quade Cooper found the coaching so chaotic at Toulon he couldn’t wait to get out.

That will not be the case at Montpellier, where Aaron Cruden will play under fellow New Zealander Vern Cotter, but the expectation levels will still be significant.

Montpellier are awash with foreign players – largely South Africans and Australians – brought in Jake White’s spell in charge but have little to show for it. Their 57-3 capitulation against Leinster last weekend in the European Champions Cup was widely seen as an embarrassment.

Their former Springbok, Frans Steyn, looking 5-10kg overweight, was sent off for a swinging arm on Ireland first five-eighth Johnny Sexton. It was another signal that all was not well at the club.

The reasons put forth by France-based rugby writer Gavin Mortimer for the fall-off in French crowds are various, some specific to the Paris clubs Racing 92 and Stade Francais in the wake of terrorist attacks.

However, his overall conclusion was biting: the Top 14 standard hasn’t been very good. Quality games have been few and far between and fans are apparently voting with their feet.

The ascendant competition is Europe is England’s Aviva Premiership.

These issues for Cruden will be softened by the significant pay packet and the opportunity to lap up a cultural experience that will be genuinely refreshing.

But while there are those pull factors to lure Cruden there may have been a bit of pushing, too, even if it was of the gentle variety.

Anyone who has seen Cruden at Chiefs training knows he is a boss.

And when you watch Cruden play it’s the things he does off the ball that set him apart – the hard things such as putting chargedown pressure on his opposites, his toughness in contact, that cover tackle on Clyde Rathbone in the 2013 Super Rugby final that essentially won the game.

But there have been issues off the field.

There was one notable disciplinary breach in 2014, when Cruden missed a flight to Argentina while on All Blacks duty, and of course the Chiefs’ predilection for strippers at their end of season get-togethers.

As Chiefs co-captain he assumes more than his fair share of responsibility for those tawdry occasions.

It would be therefore be nigh on astonishing if the view from NZ Rugby towards Cruden wasn’t sterner than has been aired publicly.

Certainly key sponsor ASB let its feelings be known in December when chief executive Barbara Chapman said she ‘‘despaired’’ at last year’s off-field rugby scandals.

Still, that chapter is now behind Cruden.

What awaits is a new challenge and for once that word is not just a cliche. France is not a holiday, not any more.