CHRIS HEWETT
Hot news! Manchester City won the Premier League. Again. Didn't see that one coming. And Bayern Munich are champions of Germany. Again. Who'd have thought it? And Paris Saint-Germain are top dogs in France. Again. Hell's teeth, what a turn-up.
God only knows what further shocks lay in wait. The Prime Minister being economical with the truth? The tabloids running a story about Katie Price? Night following day? Enough already. The heart can't take it.
If variety is the spice of sporting life, the continent's elite football leagues are as interesting as polenta. (Italy: three different winners of Serie A in 21 years). To which we can only say, thank heaven for the rugby men of La Rochelle, who, in Marseille last weekend, became the 13th club to land a European Cup title since the competition's launch in the mid-1990s.
There were many, this columnist included, who confidently expected Leinster's grandees to do a job on the insurgents from Nouvelle-Aquitaine. Instead, the Dubliners failed to hold firm against opponents who, in the enforced absence of their All Black contingent, took the field with Jonathan Danty, Uini Atonio and Gregory Alldritt as box-office attractions.
Brilliantly as all three played – Alldritt is a proper No.8, for sure – it was not as if we were talking Philippe Sella, Robert Paparemborde and Walter Spanghero. Not since 1997, when Brive did for Leicester in the mother and father of cup final muggings, has a French side won the Big One with a line-up so obviously greater than the sum of its parts.
But there is a broader point screaming to be made. Like Toulon in 2013 and Exeter in 2020, the west-coasters reached the summit just a handful of years after promotion into the top division of their domestic tournament. Which tells you all you need to know about the importance of access, of pathways, of open doors – of the sanctity of ambition.
Almost as often as we hear a “television match official” address a referee as “mate”, we are told that the gulf between the Premiership and the Championship in England is too wide to be bridged and that ring-fencing, or a more mealy-mouthed version of the same thing, is the only sensible way forward.
Faint echoes of the same argument are beginning to be heard on the far side of the Channel, largely because the best ProD2 sides are finding it difficult to recruit Top 14-standard talent until their promotion is secured via the end-of-season play-offs. As those play-offs go deep into the summer, confirmation is not so much late as posthumous.
Yet as recently as 2014, La Rochelle were spending their weekends wrestling with the likes of Auch, Dax and Tarbes – heavy hitters back in the dim and distant days of small-town warfare masquerading as rugby, but now smelling strongly of museums. As it turned out, “Les Corsaires” were the second of two clubs promoted into the Top 14 that year. The others were Lyon, who have just won the European Challenge Cup.
“Rugby still has its dreamers. Take away the Toulons, Exeters and La Rochelles and what is left?”
Toulon, three-time French champions fallen on very hard times, made it back into the Top 14 in 2008. Five years later, they conquered Europe, retaining the title in 2014 and winning it again the year after that, earning themselves a place among the great teams of the modern era. It could not have happened under ring-fencing.
“Ah, but that was in France,” you say, “and France is different to England”. Two things here. Firstly, you're right. Secondly, you're not right enough. The Exeter story tells us that.
In 2010, the Devonians were fighting tooth and nail with…er…Moseley, London Welsh and Birmingham & Solihull. A decade on, they were prevailing over Racing 92 – Kurtley Beale, Virimi Vakatawa, Finn Russell, Maxime Machenaud and all – in a tourniquet-tight Champions Cup final.
The people at the top end of the Exeter operation may or may not have turned turtle in recent years. If they have, they would not be the first to parrot the old Keynesian line about “changing our minds when the facts change” – the most relevant fact change being that they're now in the Premiership.
Undeniably, you need a mind's eye more powerful than the Hubble Telescope to foresee Ealing or Doncaster doing an Exeter or a La Rochelle this side of eternity. But was this not precisely what we felt about Exeter just a few seasons back? Truth be told, Exeter were probably feeling the same way about themselves.
Many of those who support a nailing down of the trapdoor do so for perfectly respectable reasons. Some admire the American sporting model of franchised socialism for rich people and want to move the English game in that direction; others believe passionately that long-term failures of investment and incentivisation have rendered the second tier of the English game an irrelevance; still more are balance-sheet pragmatists who see promotion and relegation as the highest form of commercial insanity.
But rugby still has its dreamers, and rightly so. Take away the Toulons, the Exeters and the La Rochelles and what is left? Creatine, concussion and crooked scrum feeds? There's not much romance in that.
