Peter Jackson: Leinster operating on another level and have exposed competition's flaws again
Leinster's James Ryan signs autographs after the game. Picture: INPHO/Laszlo Geczo
Every once in a while someone comes along who is simply too good for his or her sport, like Martin Navratilova and Pete Sampras, Michael Schumacher and Tiger Woods.
Leinster have a long way to go to monopolise Rugby Union the way the aforementioned monopolised Grand Slam tennis, Formula One and the golfing majors but not a Champions’ Cup weekend passes now without reaffirmation of the capital province as a cut above the rest.
While reaching ever higher for hitherto untouched plateaux of excellence is all very laudable, killing off the competition comes at a price. Just as Schumacher reduced motor racing to a procession, so Leinster are doing likewise in a way which ought to alarm the organisers as much as it thrills the blue bloods of D4.
It will not occur to them, nor should it, that their team is in the process of doing for the Champions’ Cup what a chain-smoking crane driver from Barrow-in-Furness did for the Open Golf championship during the baking summer of 1976.
The late Maurice Flitcroft has long done down in golf legend as the hacker who gate-crashed final qualifying and went round in 121 shots. In doing so under false pretences, he also shot something else: the credibility of the Open.
By making mincemeat of the locals at Kingsholm on Saturday, Leinster unwittingly exposed the format of the Champions’ Cup to similar ridicule. Their home-and-away thrashing of Gloucester amounted to 106-14, 16 touch downs forcing their Premiership opponents to take up a default position behind their own posts once every ten minutes.
The absurdity is not to be found on the scoreboard but in the fact that Gloucester can still qualify for the Round of 16. As guardians of the Open, the Royal & Ancient Golf Club disqualified Flitcroft. Gloucester, beaten 57-0 and 49-14 in successive rounds, are alive and kicking.
It’s not the first time Europe’s elite club competition has been exposed to ridicule. Last season Montpellier made a mockery of it, sending a second XV to Dublin where they lost 89-7 on top of a 42-6 beating at Exeter yet they qualified for the last 16 despite winning just one of their four matches.
What kind of tournament allows that to happen?
Not that long ago when the Heineken Cup’s unique magic would draw crowds on a Six Nations scale, qualifying for the knock-out stage was so demanding that winning four of the six pool matches often wasn’t enough. Toulouse and Leinster suffered such a fate in the same season, ten years ago.
Losing one pool match then left no room for error. Now under a grossly inferior format winning one can get you through. There should be no reward for failure, least of all in a supposedly elite event.
The organisers, European Professional Club Rugby, says it is working on the format. ‘’It’s got to be understandable to any fans,’’ chairman Dominic McKay told BTSport. ‘’But also understandable to new fans.’’ The solution is not hard to find. Instead of copying football, why not scrap the Round of 16, revert to the six-match pool system and go straight into the quarter-finals.
Why not? Because, a cynic might think, that would mean reverting to the system used when the Unions ran the competition before the clubs took over. And that would be seen as a tacit admission that the Unions made a better job of it which they did.
Under the old system, Gloucester wouldn’t have had a prayer. Instead they go to Bordeaux on Saturday clinging to the hope of reminding non-believers why it’s a funny old game. In that event the joke will go down like a lead balloon at Champions’ Cup HQ in Lausanne.
Now that Europe is beginning to rediscover its lost Welsh tribe in the form of Ospreys, video evidence of the birds of prey soaring again above Swansea will be essential viewing for Andy Farrell and his analysts.
No Welsh team has been sighted in the knock-out stages of Europe’s main competition for ten years since when Ospreys, for one, have soldiered on in defiance of periodic rumours about extinction.
Now it’s all about distinction in the form of a double win over French champions Montpellier. The Welsh revivalists go to Leicester on Friday knowing that a four-point win would raise hopes of leap-frogging the already qualified Tigers in pursuit of a home tie in the last 16.
Farrell will be more concerned with the bigger picture of the Six Nations and how a resurgent Ospreys will stimulate Wales, first up for Ireland on February 4.
Having already sacked half of the four specialists coaches inherited following Wayne Pivac’s dismissal, Warren Gatland has promised to shake up a squad demoralised by losing to Georgia and a 2nd/3rd Australian XV on successive Saturdays in the autumn.
Ireland’s coaches need no reminding of what will be blindingly obvious from the Ospreys’ 35-28 home win over Montpellier, that Justin Tipuric takes some beating as the complete back row forward for whom nothing is ever too much trouble.
Farrell will also want the Ospreys’ starting tighthead put under the microscope, not Tomas Francis but Tom Botha. The 32-year-old tighthead from Cape Town is eligible for Wales this year, a highly significant development considering how Georgia pulverised the Welsh scrum two months ago.
David Duckham belonged to a rare breed, an Englishman so revered by the Welsh that they claimed him as one of their own in honour of his stylish contribution to the Lions’ only series victory in New Zealand. Whenever his name cropped up in the half century since, Welsh fans never failed to call him ‘Dai’ Duckham.
The Irish loved him, too, albeit for a very different reason, one of such significance that no history of 20th century Anglo-Irish sport would be complete without a reference to the laughing cavalier from Coventry.
Early in 1972, Scotland and Wales refused to honour their Five Nations’ fixtures at Lansdowne Road amid security fears in the immediate aftermath of Bloody Sunday in Derry. When England’s turn came the following year with The Troubles still wreaking death and destruction they went where the Celts feared to tread.
According to no less an authority than Willie-John McBride, they did so because Duckham, with whom the venerable Ulsterman forged a lifelong friendship during the ’71 Lions tour, allayed fears among his England team-mates and ensure their presence.
‘’I certainly have no doubt whatsoever that if David had not done what he did, the match would not have gone ahead,’’ McBride wrote in his autobiography. ‘’What David and his wife, Jean, for the future of rugby football was incalculable.’’ Duckham, ever ready to give of his time and reminisce about times long gone, recalled some of the more humourous events behind that Dublin trip. ‘’At the airport we walked straight off the plane onto a bus which looked like an armoured personnel carrier with police outriders everywhere.
‘’I was sat next to Andy Ripley (England and Lions’ No. 8). He had a window seat. Suddenly, he started to rock forwards and backwards until someone asked him: ‘What’s the matter?’ ‘’Then ‘Rippers’ said: ‘I’m trying to make it difficult for a sniper.’ It was very funny and after a few seconds we all cracked up. It broke the tension because until then we were all on edge.’’ Duckham, whose refusal to let Irish rugby down ensured England a five-minute ovation before kick-off simply for turning up, maintained his friendship with McBride until the very end. ‘Dai’ Duckham died last week at the age of 76 so close to the 50th anniversary of the match he fought to save.
: The Tigers doing what nobody had ever done to the Michelin men in their own backyard, a points record due reward for outstanding performances from, among others, Wales flanker Tommy Reffell and England’s veteran scrum half, Ben Youngs.
: The free-spending Parisians daring to demonstrate a dangerous new way of winning: How to win with three men in the bin. Racing’s implosion seemed complete when Irish referee Andrew Brace rightly awarded Harlequins a penalty try and sent Finn Russell packing for a deliberate knock-on. Two minutes remained, long enough for the Londoners to find a way of losing.
For more than an hour on the Atlantic coast, in conditions which made it difficult to separate the rain from the ocean, the teams slogged their way towards a pointless draw until Nathan Doak’s penalty broke the deadlock. The northerners were still clinging to a famous win until 46 seconds into red-clock time when Argentina’s 21-stone loosehead Joel Sclavi slithered over.
London Irish achieved a rare double yesterday made all the more so by its simultaneous nature, falling out of Europe while jumping to the top of a very different table.
Two red cards against the Stormers in London yesterday took the Exiles clear of the field for the most sendings-off this season. Irish now have five, one more than Toulouse and Scarlets, and as many as they had last season, a recurring problem for Director of Rugby Declan Kidney.
15 Melvyn Jaminet (Toulouse) 14 Jordan Larmour (Leinster) 13 Matt Scott (Leicester Tigers) 12 Jamie Osborne (Leinster) 11 Shane Daly (Munster) 10 Marcus Smith (Harlequins) 9 Antoine Dupont (Toulouse) 1 Val Rapava Ruskin (Gloucester) 2 Dan Sheehan (Leinster) 3 Tom Botha (Ospreys) 4 Dafydd Jenkins (Exeter) 5 James Ryan (Leinster) 6 Iain Henderson (Ulster) 7 Justin Tipuric (Ospreys) 8 Gavin Coombes (Munster) End.
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