Success may let Sarries and Chiefs rest players
With the Champions Cup starting this weekend, it brings into focus the differing ways that the three European leagues manage their players. The Celts will moan about the French and English ‘moneybags’, and in return they’ll moan about the injustice of the Irish being able to wrap their star players in cotton wool. On BT Sports Rugby
Tonight, which last week showed signs of heading down the Sky Sports road of becoming an Irish lovein, now that they have the broadcasting rights to the European competitions, there was a throwaway comment about the number of players Leinster used during last season.
They apparently used 55, while Munster used 51, and Ulster 47. The starting personnel announced for Friday’s match against Wasps turned out 99 times for Leinster last season, which means that their best players averaged 6.6 ‘club’ appearances during the campaign!
I offer no judgement on whether that’s good, bad, fair or unfair, or whether or not fans are being shortchanged – it’s just how they do things in Ireland, and it pays dividends in the European competitions, with six wins in the past 13 years.
I do, however, wonder just how big Leinster and Munster’s budgets are, and whether the ‘moneybags’ term really should be applied to them? Equally, bearing in mind that the Gallagher Premiership isn’t going to pale in terms of intensity and quality, and enforced rest periods such as the ones the IRFU impose on their players simply aren’t going to happen here, it just illustrates once again that the English sides need to find a way of having much bigger squads.
The logic for this is overwhelming, and by the time the later stages of the Champions Cup come round expect to see results showing that.
There is one caveat, and it’s the gulf that has opened up between the top two English clubs, Exeter Chiefs and Saracens, and the rest. Heading into this weekend they were no fewer than ten points clear of their nearest rivals.
If they can maintain that form then, come the later pool games and the knock-out stages, they might just be able to ‘go Irish’ and rest a few players for Premiership matches, something that would help them greatly in Europe.
So, you’re sitting in an interminable disciplinary hearing and to relieve the boredom you take to Twitter. Maybe it was a comment from a fan on a forum, or an email you received, so you post ‘What a joke’: what could possibly be wrong with that?
Nothing, but if the disciplinary panel decided that your comment referred to what they were doing, then that would be both disrespectful and daft.
We don’t know why the panel decided they couldn’t resolve the Nathan Hughes’ hearing that evening, but there is speculation his Tweet was taken as referring to what was going on, and they took a dim view of it.
The wider point is that this is yet another unsatisfactory disciplinary matter that shows rugby in a bad light. Players sometimes get punished if they’ve done something that reflects badly on the game, but a panel dithering for hours looks plain incompetent. I’m sure they would argue that with lawyers present this is a quasi-legal process and needs proper consideration, but it has left many wondering whether the panel members are paid by the hour!
At one time if a hearing was scheduled for 18:30 you’d expect to hear something a couple of hours later, but they now seem to go on forever.
You’d be hard pressed to find anyone who thinks that rugby’s disciplinary processes work well, and that’s got to be a worry.
The Challenge Cup has always seemed like the losers’ cup to me. It’s where your club ends up if they aren’t good enough to play with the big boys, and this year the gulf is set to grow even wider. BT Sports are showing all ten Champions Cup pool games each weekend, which means the Challenge Cup has been squeezed out of the schedules.
With some big names such as Harlequins, Northampton Saints, Ospreys, Clermont, and Stade Francais relegated to the second tier, there will be a lot of fans desperately scouring the internet to find some way of watching their club’s matches.