Box-office climax to thrilling campaign

The Last day of the regular season summed up the appeal of the 2018-19 Premiership. it has been a two-tier event, with all the finemargin drama below the summit.

exeter and saracens are on course to meet in the final, as they have been for months. they are at home in the play-offs next saturday against northampton and Gloucester respectively. Barring a momentous upset at either allianz Park or sandy Park in five days, the league will have its fitting decider at twickenham on June 1.

saracens finished second in the table but the chiefs will do well to deny them a domestic and european double.

With due respect to the standard-bearers, all the intrigue has long been elsewhere, in the squeezed middle and down in the danger zone.

newcastle fought until the penultimate round before being consigned to the drop, which came as a relief to free-falling Leicester. so the remaining focus was on the scrap for the last playoff place and for champions cup qualification.

it was comic-book chaos. this column argued that the semi-finals create the spectre of injustice at the end of a season when two clubs have been so far ahead of the rest, but there can be no disputing that the system created a boxoffice climax.

northampton and harlequins swapped places so many times on saturday. none of the ‘as it stands’ tables stood for long, on a day when five of the six matches were settled by one score. the saints were losing in Devon but clinging on to fourth, only for Quins to rally late in coventry and earn a last-minute shot to keep their title ambitions alive another week. James Lang’s long-range penalty fell just inches short. the crossbar and the outcome were the height of cruelty.

Only one point separated northampton in fourth and seventh-placed sale — who would have been in the semi-finals next weekend if Faf de Klerk’s late penalty at Bristol in the previous round had gone over, rather than bouncing off a post.

instead, the cheshire club may miss out on the champions cup after Bath claimed a try two minutes from time at Welford road to seize a bonus-point win over Leicester which thrust them up to sixth.

all of this was happening in the shadow of the exeter-saracens duopoly, but it didn’t dilute the sense of sporting tension. the Premiership has its faults, but dull and predictable it certainly is not.