A Champions Cup so lacking in substance and purpose, it resembles a ghost searching for someone to haunt; a pre-shrunk Lions tour of Australia that still ended up smaller than the sum of its parts; the great rugby nation of Wales so broken, it makes Monty Python’s limbless knight look like a title-winning bodybuilder. Happy New Year, one and all.

The sport’s governing class routinely dismiss their growing army of critics as muddle-headed “doomsters”, pointing to significant upturns in television viewership (without telling us by how many) and income (without telling us by how much). It was ...