The Champions Cup, a misnomer if ever there was one, gorged itself last weekend on a feast of tries: 107 at an average of almost exactly nine per match, the redefinition of gluttony.

A try every ten minutes over 12 matches in six countries requires a bemusing mixture of ingenuity and incompetence: heaven for aficionados of basketball scores, hell for those reared on the scrum-fests of Leicester’s A B C front row and the speed cop wearing G on his back, Dean Richards.
The New Year blizzard as witnessed under a blazing African sun in Pretoria might be seen as a harbinger of what’s about to come...