Saracens chaos could create toxic climate in England camp
Eddie Jones built his World Cup finalists around the champions and now hopes to clear the air in Portugal, but the resentment of other players may still be bubbling
In the week leading up to the rugby World Cup final, former and serving England players queued to extol Owen Farrell’s leadership qualities. The same Farrell, of disgraced and relegated Saracens, must now stand before the 2020 Six Nations squad stripped of some of his authority.
Of all the fantasies doing the rounds about the Saracens scandal, few rank higher than the notion that England will just “pull together” when the Six Nations starts; simply shove to one side festering resentments over salary-cap evasions and dodgy trophy hauls. This is not Tom Brown’s School Days, where chaps jolly well get on with it.
If we know one thing about dressing rooms, it is that players are obsessed with who earns what and whether they deserve it. In this England locker room, many of the big beasts, including the captain, lurch in after their club abused the salary cap for four seasons and then seemingly jumped at the offer of relegation to avoid further scrutiny. Equally, some Saracens players will resent being judged and suspect other clubs of having their own cheeky schemes.
Rugby union has looked pretty dishonest lately. Dishonest for not publishing the findings of the Dyson Report so we can all see precisely what Saracens did wrong. And dishonest, in Saracens’ case, for paying players more, through “investment” schemes, than the rules allowed.
There is no doubting the authenticity of Saracens on the field. Yet there will be players at Eddie Jones’s training camp in Portugal who will have seen their own sides smashed into the ground by the strength of “Sarries”, by players who were allegedly riding vehicles such as Faz Investments Ltd – a firm set up jointly for Farrell and the club’s owner, Nigel Wray. Does anyone seriously expect non-saracens England players to feel the same camaraderie Jones sought in Japan, where they were thumped in the World Cup final?
Jones said in Yokohama when South Africa were crowned champions that the England of 2019 were finished. Prescient, perhaps, but not in a way he could have imagined. For the head coach, the Saracens imbroglio is a hospital pass at a point in the cycle where he must persuade English rugby that he is still the man to deliver.
Overcompensating for the chaos a secretive and hubristic club game has dumped on him, Jones said at the squad unveiling: “We didn’t play well in the [World Cup] final. We have a good opportunity to talk about that, learn from it and then go on and be the greatest team that the game of rugby has ever seen.”
This is throwing a dead cat on the table to divert attention from the frictions that could infect England’s Six Nations build-up, which was already overshadowed by their “no-show” against South Africa in Japan.
Those demons would have been hard enough to exorcise without huge men with a talent for brutality glaring at one another across the muddy laundry. The Saracens core Jones drew on, ultimately without success, not only bear the guilt of having dominated club rugby partly through nefarious means but have their own futures to worry about, especially with England and the British and Irish Lions.
To see Farrell, Maro Itoje, Jamie George, Mako Vunipola, George Kruis and Elliot Daly framed in this light makes you wonder how it can be all right on the night in Paris. Jones could hardly throw his arms up and declare this Six Nations campaign a travesty, but privately he must know that “clear-the-air talks” in Portugal tomorrow are a fool’s errand. All he can do is ask the players to be professional, even as Farrell’s iron-man captaincy may now seem hollow to some.
“The really good players are good at compartmentalising issues,” Jones said. But these are not any old “issues”. The best team in the country have accepted relegation as the least bad of their options. The full findings are denied to players and clubs who are entitled to know what went on. This very English obsession with secrecy offends many rugby fans and leaves questions dangling all over the Six Nations Championship.
If this England squad can concoct some way of working together while the churn of coaches continues and the Saracens fire sale commences, then good luck to them. But there will be players in Jones’s set-up who feel they have lost out on money and opportunities, by Saracens cheating the system. As uncertainty grows about where the club’s best players will end up –