Top two’s message to their rivals – catch us if you can
New season starts with a clutch of clubs aiming to challenge Saracens and Exeter, and the added intrigue of players chasing World Cup places, writes Mick Cleary
There is little need to manufacture a sense of excitement for the Gallagher Premiership season when a crowd in excess of 25,000 has already pledged to go through the Ashton Gate turnstiles tonight, buoyed and bubbly in anticipation of a West Country derby between Bristol and Bath.
Those whetted appetites are their own testimony to the fact that the Premiership has appeal and credibility, despite cumulative financial losses across its 12 clubs of some £28.5million per annum.
The product itself has value, as will be seen in Bristol and across the land on this opening weekend, from Exeter tomorrow to Newcastle the following day when the champions, Saracens, begin the defence of their title with a tricky trip to the North-east.
Much as Sarries have dominated the domestic landscape with three titles in the past four years, there are no certainties on a first weekend of action that should see the likes of new recruits such as fly-halves Danny Cipriani at Gloucester and Northampton’s Dan Biggar looking to show their influence at Kingsholm, and new directors of rugby, Paul Gustard for Harlequins and Northampton’s Chris Boyd, aiming to settle their nerves with the comfort of a win.
Fittingly, though, the focal point is Ashton Gate. Can the newlycoined Bristol Bears buck the trend of nearly every promoted side over the past decade bar Exeter Chiefs and become a force to be reckoned with in the Premiership?
Bristol have the resources, the tradition and the will to succeed. But deep as the pockets of joint Bristol football and rugby owner Steve Lansdown are, there are no guarantees that money alone can buy instant success.
Yet the air of bounce and optimism around the city is no blind devotion to the tribal cause.
This is Bristol’s second stab at putting the city back on the rugby map in the manner of the amateur era when they even lorded it over tonight’s visitors, or at least until Jack Rowell started to get things moving at the Rec in the mideighties.
Two years ago, Bristol tailed off after promotion and were immediately relegated. This time, under the seasoned stewardship of Pat Lam, there is far more of a sense of direction and legitimate purpose about the club.
The Premiership campaign stands in its own right in claiming our interest over (technically) 10 months, with the final at Twickenham nudging into June, but there is added intrigue in the jostling for World Cup places among the players.
Even seasoned operators such as Owen Farrell at Saracens or Leicester’s Ben Youngs know that their international prospects will be compromised if they do not perform for their clubs first and foremost. And those two players, more so than many, have long lived by that mantra.
That has been the ethos that has underpinned Saracens’ rise to their pre-eminent status. There have been many attempts to locate the secret at the heart of their success, as if there were some genie in a lamp located away in Harpenden that sprinkles magic dust at each and every training session, but the simple truth is that they recruit well, from within as much as they do from without, and they believe in each other and their systems.
Even Saracens had a spell on skid row last season, losing seven in a row across all competitions and shipping 46 points at home to Clermont Auvergne on one bone-chilling night in December, yet they rolled back the stone from that position of seeming terminal decline to rise to the Premiership heights in May.
Mark Mccall, their director of rugby, made a telling comment last week at the launch of the Gallagher Premiership when remarking that it was important “not to see ghosts when you are going through tough times”.
Saracens stayed true to their core values and came through the bad period.
That approach infuses much of what their closest challengers, Exeter Chiefs, do as a club and as a team on the field. Neither club have recruited heavily, with wings featuring at the centre of their trading business in the summer, David Strettle returning to Saracens from Clermont and Wales’s Alex Cuthbert hoping to revitalise his Test career at Sandy Park, yet both are the frontrunners once again for the Premiership.
Who will give them a run to the tape? Wasps have been up there but they look stretched by injury, departures and late arrivals across this initial stretch of six rounds of Premiership activity. One of the most influential figures in the league, goalkicking fly-half and centre Jimmy Gopperth, is likely to miss the entire season after a cruciate injury suffered in a friendly against Connacht last week. Their marquee signing, the wondrous All Black stand-off Lima Sopoaga, is only just in the country, while Cipriani has moved to Gloucester.
There are a clutch of clubs looking to declare themselves back in the Premiership ball game, notably Northampton, Harlequins and Gloucester. The Saints, with former Ospreys fly-half Biggar at the helm, look best equipped to get back up the ladder although the addition of some serious South African beef, such as lock Franco Mostert, to go with the dazzle of Danny Boy might finally be enough to rouse the Cherry-andwhites.
The mid-table jigsaw will be in a constant state of re-arrangement. It is high time that Sale Sharks did what Newcastle Falcons managed to do last season and break into the top four, and even if Chris Ashton’s seven-week suspension is a blow to those ambitions, there is no reason why the Sharks cannot emulate their northern counterparts, the Falcons. Newcastle, gritty and clever in equal measure, will want to get off to a flying start on Sunday by downing the champions to show that last season was not a flash in the pan.
There are many other plot lines to savour, be it Bath’s long-awaited renaissance or Worcester shedding their image of perennial strugglers, in a narrative that will twist and turn through winter and into spring.
The many plot lines in the narrative will twist and turn through winter and into spring