Eight days that will shape the season

SO THAT’S what Purgatory feels like. Forget about the weather – two weeks into the New Year and practically no rugby.

Cabin fever can become a real problem, so much so that when I informed a desperate rugby nut that the Leicester-Wasps Premiership game had survived the freeze and was live on Sky Sports, he hugged me like a long-lost sibling. At least now a remedy is at hand – Heineken Cup, we missed ya.

As it happened, that Premiership game reinforced my view that the scrum has once again become far more central to the outcome of every game. In Munster’s narrow defeat in Ravenhill the previous week, it was the key difference between winning and losing, with Ulster dominant in that phase. For the second week in a row, Wasps were dismantled in the scrum and subsequently paid the price, losing to both Newcastle and the Tigers.