Premiership sides have to hit the ground running in Europe

A good start is vital in the Champions Cup so Wasps and Harlequins must pick up the pace

After a start to the season in which injuries have accumulated for many Premiership sides, thoughts turn to Europe. The Champions Cup is the grail for which clubs will sacrifice everything save their Premiership status yet, now that the first round of European games take place this week, supporters of many of the English sides will be apprehensive about how the games will turn out.

Harlequins and Wasps, both in Pool 1, have a litany of unavailable players and both have had uneven starts. Such is the nature of pool games in Europe that you can easily find yourself out of the knockout stages with a poor start, especially in your home fixtures.

Likewise, Bath, Northampton and Leicester have not shown the overall consistency and form from which you can predict a smooth passage through their opening games. Not only are these sides looking for their injury lists to shorten, they need their overall performances to become more focused and disciplined to ensure passage into the later stages.

Hopes for the other two English teams, Saracens and Exeter, appear much brighter subject to the above caveat and about hitting form in the opening games. The earlyseason standards have been good and, significantly, both have slotted into respective patterns and systems with a degree of familiarity and comfort which has eluded Premiership counterparts.

For the Chiefs, the challenges of Glasgow, Leinster and Montpellier should provide more open games than attritional, and that will suit their overall style. Even so, Exeter have relatively little experience at this level and this is a tournament that shows that you have to have experience to win it and repeat that feat. Looking at the sides who have dominated the competition, you see a list of the European elite – Leinster, Toulouse, Toulon and Saracens.

The holders are seeking to make it three titles in a row and they have the squad to succeed. Yesterday’s comfortable win over Wasps showed that their returning British and Irish Lions players have managed to step seamlessly back. Only from their second European Champions Cup did Saracens gain the universal respect that they deserved but you now have to view them as the side with the best overall game and squad to adapt to the various challenges that come from a variety of European teams, differences in weather conditions and fluctuations in form, depending on the timing of each stage of the tournament in a long season.

Much has been made of the injury toll in the Premiership but, in truth, the statistics do not prove the claim that it is the new law trials brought in this year which are to blame. The reasoning goes like this – the new trials have increased the number of tackles and collisions and, thus, there has been an inevitable increase in the number of injuries.

Not only have there been too few rounds to back that claim, it flies in the face of other Premiership statistics and information from other domestic leagues which are running under the same trials and where there have not been the same number of injuries.

The number of collisions in the Premiership has been increasing at about the same rate over the past few seasons, according to Opta statistics. Thus, you cannot claim this season’s similar percentage increase is attributable to the trials.

It is true that the number of tackles in the Premiership has steadily gone up each year since 2013-14 but in the Pro12/14 and the Top 14 the tackle count is relatively static over the past three seasons, with only small fluctuations.

You cannot deny the injuries suffered by Premiership players but the real reason for this and for the Premiership differing from the Pro12/14 and Top 14, requires more information to be processed, over a longer period.

What does not help, is poor or dangerous technique in tackles and you can add to this the uneven refereeing of breakdowns which allow clearing techniques to include non-binding shoulder charges. What might surprise you is that by far the biggest influence on and cause of an increase to a team’s injury rate is a change of coaching staff.