The Guinness Premiership's oft-repeated claim to run the best club league in Europe is looking more feeble with the passing of every Heineken Cup weekend. By this time next week, the French will almost certainly have won four of the six pools, the English none, writes ercrugby.com columnist, Peter Jackson.
The Guinness Premiership's oft-repeated claim to run the best club league in Europe is looking more feeble with the passing of every Heineken Cup weekend. By this time next week, the French will almost certainly have won four of the six pools, the English none.
If that comes to pass, it will be a double first. No country has supplied more than three pool winners since the introduction of the 24-club format ten seasons ago and England's clubs have never drawn a blank. Despite more starters than anyone else, the few survivors of their seven-man contingent will be counted out of the automatic quarter-final places unless Northampton win at Thomond Park on Friday and London Irish respond to their masochistic version of the Sunday roast at lunch-time in
west Wales with a similarly implausible win, over holders Leinster at Twickenham on Saturday evening.
As usual, Leicester promise to stand between the Red Rose and obliteration, not that any one will envy their task. An away win in Swansea on Saturday when the best of Anglo-Welsh enemies renew their hostility would put the Tigers through, at worst as one of the two runners-up. A home win will do the trick for the Ospreys but Clermont's inevitable romp at Viadana means that not even a five-point Leicester win at the Liberty will prevent the Michelin Men rolling through as pool winners, joining Biarritz, Toulouse and, if they survive Saturday's tip to Edinburgh, Stade Francais.
Whatever the gods have in store for the concluding pool weekend, English contenders amongst the quarter-finalists will be unusually thin on the ground. The same can be said of English players and nowhere were they scarcer than at one of the famous old provincial bastions where the European dream remains more elusive than ever.
Back in the days before global warming when the English Cup final would often bring the domestic season to a sweltering climax, Gloucester would send an all-English team to Twickenham. The one they dispatched there in 1990 contained so many from the city's teeming junior clubs like Gordon League, Matson, Coney Hill, Longlevens, Hucclecote, Tredworth and
many more that they left precious little room for the outsider.
The local emphasis was such that the one 'foreigner' in their ranks happened to be another Englishman, Don Caskie, on the basis that he had turned out for the Scottish Exiles in vain pursuit of a cap. As it transpired, Bath gave Gloucester a roasting and somehow it has never quite been the same again.
The working-class passion for the game is still greater than anywhere else in England but the old production lines are not what they used to be. At Kingsholm last Saturday, Gloucester did something which would have been unthinkable a generation or so ago before unheard of subjects like professionalism, the Treaty of Rome and Kolpak combined to change the demographics of the sport.
The English representation in the old Cherry & Whites line-up was down to five including Lesley Vainikolo, whose improbable conversion into an Anglo-Saxon Test wing began a fair distance from the Forest of Dean in his native Tonga. Full back Olly Morgan and James Simpson-Daniel on the right wing completed one English contingent behind the scrum while locks
Dave Attwood and Alex Brown formed an even smaller one in it.
The rising foreign legion has long been an issue for the RFU, one made almost insoluble by European employment law. Saracens, for example, kicked off with six English-qualified players against Toulon in the Amlin Challenge Cup. Northampton had seven for their home romp against a Perpignan team who had lost interest in the Heineken before Christmas, London Irish had seven at Llanelli and Sale ten at Cardiff, not that it did them much good.
Leicester still managed eleven but it comes to something when Gloucester, of all clubs, have twice as many Scots (Alasdair Dickinson, Scott Lawson, Alasdair Strokosch, Rory Lawson), Welsh (Nicky Robinson, Gareth Delve) and New Zealanders (Greg Somerville, Tim Molenaar) as native English in their starting XV topped by the excellence of their Samoan
centre, Eliota Fuimaono-Sapolu. True, their finishing team, redesigned fore and aft with international No. 8 Luke Narraway spearheading a posse of home-grown subs, had more of an English look, not that the Kingsholm faithful seemed too bothered.
At last they had something in Europe to shout about, a handsome win over the hitherto unbeaten Biarritz even if it did come against opponents weakened by the loss of six crocked internationals - Dimitri Yachvili, Damien Traille, Fabien Barcella, Julien Peyrelongue, Campbell Johnstone and Iain Balshaw, a former Gloucester player who would have beenconsidered far more of a foreigner during his time with the dreaded Bath.
How ironic that Gloucester's 23-8 win, their best in Europe since they beat the same opponents by a similar score last season should result in Biarritz being pronounced the first of the six pool winners. All Gloucester need now for a miraculous delivery into the last eight is to beat the Dragons in Newport this week with a try bonus and hope that at least six other results go their way.
Their only realistic goal is to finish well enough to grab one of the three vacancies in the Amlin Challenge Cup and hope for a short cut back into the Heineken next season. Biarritz, resigned to being without Yachvili and other big hitters until the competition resums after the Six Nations, need a maximum-point home win over Glasgow on Sunday if they are to enjoy
the right to take another quarter-final across the Spanish border and share it with their fellow Basques on the splendidly colourful stage in San Sebastian.
No team will be tempted to give themselves as severe a kicking this week as London Irish. Going into the final quarter at Parc Y Scarlets, they conceded three converted tries to lose a match which they ought to have had in their pockets at 22-10. Their fate ought to serve as a classic example of what is liable to happen when a team allows the pursuit of bonus points to distract it from winning the game.
With three tries in the bag, Irish lost control in their increasingly sloppy pursuit of the fourth, bonus point try. Instead of
closing the game out, a pointless finish sends them to Twickenham on Saturday evening needing to win, score four tries and prevent Leinster pilfering as much as a losing bonus point. Head coach Toby Booth headed home from Wales shaking his head at the rueful observation that his players like to indulge in 'uphill challenges.'
They will need their oxygen apparatus for this one. Suddenly that inspiring 12-9 defeat of the holders in Dublin during the opening pool weekend last October seems a very long time ago....
Peter Jackon's predictions ofPool winners:
1 - Munster.
2 - Biarritz.
3 - Clermont Auvergne.
4 - Stade Francais.
5 - Toulouse.
6 - Leinster.
Best runners-up, two from Leicester, Ospreys, Northampton, London
Irish.
