The Irish brains inspiring Saracens
As a result of Munster’s masochistic tendency to turn losing semi-finals into an almost excruciating annual experience, the Irish cast at the wondrous Welsh temple for next month’s final will be down to two.
Thereby hangs quite a tale.
Saracens against Toulon offers more by way of subplots than the best of English against the best French, and the intriguing matter of which retiring veteran will ride off into a silver sunset — Jonny of Toulon or Steve of The Fez Heads as in Borthwick — the captain England dumped before their last, catastrophic World Cup.
The English Premiership leaders have never been this far before but their director of rugby most certainly has, if not in the role he would have wanted.
Mark McCall knows how it feels to lift the biggest non-Test trophy in the sport, not that the most modest of coaches would waste any time talking about it.
At the old Lansdowne Road at the end of the last century, after Ulster beat Colomiers, McCall the indisposed captain, raised one half of the cup and skipper David Humphreys the other.
A neck injury early that season had put paid to McCall the fearless centre and that 1999 final marked the beginning of his conversion into a thoughtful coach.
Back then, in the chaotic early days of professionalism, Ulster had a part-time backs coach, former full-back Colin Wilkinson. When he found it difficult to combine with his full-time job as a car salesman, McCall stepped in.
As befitting one who thrives on Sarries’ belief in pushing back the boundaries, Ulster’s former Celtic League-winning coach has now guided them to where they’ve never been before.
But then McCall, in his thirst for knowledge, has been to places most directors of rugby would never think of visiting, like Bayern Munich.
McCall, from Bangor in Down, describes his trip there at the start of the season and insight into Bayern’s winning culture as invaluable, so much so that it could be his team, not Pep Guardiola’s, finishing up with the European Cup on May 24.
In an era of crass exaggeration, where the greatest match the world has seen supposedly takes place almost every weekend, the Ulster man provides welcome antidote to hyperbole. So when McCall describes what Sarries did to Clermont at Twickenham as ‘phenomenal,’ he is saying something.
And part of that is down to the effect of the club’s other Irishman, Phil Morrow who resigned as Ireland’s High Performance fitness manager after the last World Cup to join Sarries as head of strength and conditioning.
McCall considers his capture to be “the best signing we’ve made at the club”. Toulon have been warned.
* The weekend’s semi-finals shared one thing in common – further evidence, not that any was required, that refereeing remains a consistently inconsistent business.
Two of the very best, Nigel Owens and Wayne Barnes, made critical decisions which will have done nothing to soothe the time-honoured French complaint that they tend to get a raw deal from British officials.
Owens was right to bin Clermont’s Australian stand-off Brock James for deliberately knocking the ball out of play during an early in-goal incident at Twickenham.
Having watched the incident repeatedly as the video referee analysed it, the Welshman then made Clermont pay a heavier price by awarding Saracens a penalty try.
Law 10.2 on foul play states that ‘it must be awarded if the offence prevents a try that would probably have been scored.’
Marcelo Bosch, the Argentinian whose aerial challenge forced James into his indiscretion, had so little room to work with that a try was anything but probable. Penalty, yes. Penalty try, no.
At Marseille, Barnes surprised everyone by deciding he did not require technological assistance to decide Simon Zebo had touched down when it looked as though Steffon Armitage had got a large hand beneath the ball.
* There are, as they say, lies, damned lies and statistics. No set of figures generated by one match told lies on a more whopping scale than those which surrounded Clermont’s nightmare at Twickenham.
According to the stats, they had more than two-thirds of possession – 68%. They had almost two-thirds of the territory – 64%. And they only had to make one tackle for almost every four by their opponents – 56 against 193. For Clermont, it all added up to the mother-and-father of a hiding.
Sarries scored six tries without reply and won by 40 points, an unprecedented margin at semi-final level which only goes to show that possession and territory count for nothing without the nous to make it count.
* Jacques Burger, who farms 14,000 acres near the Kalahari Desert when he isn’t running a one-man Panzer unit on the rugby field, gave one of the finest individual performances in European Cup history at Twickenham.
Sarries’ Namibian flanker made a staggering 27 tackles, then admitted to a still more staggering fact — that he had actually touched the ball twice.
As he said during an enforced break for fatigue: “I miss hurting people, being hurt and waking up in the middle of the night in pain.”
* So Bernard Laporte, the ex-sports minister in President Sarkozy’s administration, is to declare himself a presidential candidate in his own right — to run French rugby, not the country.
Given that he is still in the throes of 16-week touchline ban for denigrating a referee, Laporte’s action is rather like Jose Mourinho running for the presidency of the Premier League.
Meanwhile, Laporte will now attempt to become only the third manager-coach to win back-to-back European Cups. The other two? Joe Schmidt (Leinster 2011, 2012) and Dean Richards (Leicester 2001, 2002 aided and abetted by Neil Back’s jiggery-pokery in slapping the ball out of Peter Stringer’s hands as he went to feed a Munster scrum with the Tigers in danger of losing their lead).
15. Alex Goode (Saracens)
14. Chris Ashton (Saracens)
13. Mathieu Bastasreaud (Toulon)
12. Marcelo Bosch (Saracens)
11. Simon Zebo (Munster)
10. Jonny Wilkinson (Toulon)
9. Conor Murray (Munster)
1. Mako Vunipola (Saracens)
2. Schalke Brits (Saracens)
3. Carl Hayman (Toulon)
4. Steve Borthwick (Saracens)
5. Mauritz Botha (Saracens)
6. Kelly Brown (Saracens)
7. Jacques Burger (Saracens)
8. James Coughlan (Munster)
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