Fixtures putting players in impossible position

WHEN Perpignan reached the 2009 Top 14 final, Perry Freshwater made a stand. The England prop put club before country and opted out of that summer’s trip to Argentina even if it mean ringing the death knell on his Test career, which it did.

To his credit, Freshwater chose to stay with his confreres in Perpignan for the climax to the season, against Clermont at the Stade de France. His rationale revolved around an old-fashioned concept, loyalty and standing foursquare behind his team-mates.

“They are my friends,” Freshwater told me at the time. “We play and train in all kinds of weather and all kinds of places. Why would I leave them?”

The way Perpignan’s former Leicester prop saw it, there was no debate to be had. He owed it to his club to stay put and see the season through, which they did, beating Clermont 22-13 in the final.

Freshwater’s stance springs to mind over the fall-out caused by Leigh Halfpenny’s abrupt departure from Toulon, hot on the heels of the Welshman missing the Top 14 final because the Lions decreed that he joined the tour at the start, not one week later.

If an accusing finger is to be pointed, it ought to be directed at those responsible for putting players like Halfpenny in such invidious positions, the game’s power-brokers.

Rugby wants everything – Premiership, Champions’ Cup, Challenge Cup, Six Nations, World Cup and Lions tours without stopping to think about those, like Halfpenny, caught in the crossfire of the conflict between the club and international game.

It’s too late now for the Welshman to take a retrospective view and wish he’d seen the season through at Toulon, not least because they were paying him around £600,000-a-year. Meanwhile the silence from his agents is even more deafening today than it was seven days ago.