Silent truce emerges as talks on ERC future move to Rome

For a full week they looked on, as their disputed dirty linen was aired in public, but the continent’s rugby powerbrokers kept their laundry in-house yesterday after taking the first, tentative steps towards a new accord for the European game’s club tournaments.

Seventeen officials from England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, France, Italy and the ERC spent five hours in a conference room in Dublin’s Westbury Hotel but any sparks that may have flown certainly didn’t spread beyond the doors of the Grafton Suite.

Even Mark McCafferty, Premiership Rugby’s chief executive and a man who has assumed a leading role in this drama, was reluctant to divulge anything beyond the fact that it had been “a good discussion” while adding that it was still “early days” when asked if the Heineken Cup still had a future in its present guise.