English rugby fans focus on the negative

1.00pm

LONDON - Approximately 95 per cent of England's rugby community are united in their opinion on three issues.

These are that: the England team is both infinitely quieter and marginally less interesting for the absence of Austin Healey, that Wasps just about deserved their European domestic double - let's be honest, Toulouse played them off the park, and that last weekend's finals day at Twickenham was about as fair and reasonable as a tin-pot dictator with a raging toothache.

If Sale should not have been there because they had already lost, the same could be said for Bath on the basis that they had already won.

Premier Rugby are sticking rigidly to their guns over the play-off system, worse luck.

The bean-counting brigade consider Saturday's attendance of 59,000, more than 15,000 up on the 2003 gate, to be all the justification they need, and the great and good of the Rugby Football Union do not have the political will to argue with them.

Asked whether the principal sponsors of the club game, Zurich, could be expected to tolerate landslides of negative publicity on an annual basis, the union's chairman, Graeme Cattermole, responded: "Most of the bad publicity is generated by you people in the press."

When the International Olympic Committee introduces messenger-shooting as a medal event, Cattermole will strike gold.

At least Warren Gatland and Lawrence Dallaglio, the senior Wasps in the champions' nest, are not claiming, as they claimed a year ago, that they might well have won the league in the regular season had the rules made it necessary for them to do so.

The implication of that comment was that they took some fixtures less seriously than others, and therefore treated the paying public with a degree of contempt wholly unworthy of a club of such stature and tradition.

Happily, this season's championship was much closer for far longer, and kept everyone honest. Indeed, a deep-seated honesty took Wasps to the very pinnacle of the European club game.

They did not buy their titles - quite the opposite, in fact, for Dallaglio and Joe Worsley both accepted pay cuts in negotiating their contract extensions - and they did not climb the high peaks with the help of southern hemisphere muscle.

Of their first-choice side, no fewer than 11 were English-qualified. A 12th, the exceptional full-back Mark van Gisbergen, will be available to Clive Woodward from the end of next season.

The parallels between the Londoners, who have won four titles in two seasons and half a dozen in as many years, and the other sides good enough to achieve complete supremacy over the domestic game - Bath in the 12 years from 1984, Leicester between 1999 and 2002 - are striking.

All three clubs played the game with a physicality almost beyond the imaginings of their rivals; all three trained with such ferocity that weekend matches tended to be a whole lot easier than Tuesday "full-on" sessions; all three understood the importance of continuity.

If both Bath and Leicester were more insular than Wasps, it was because their community roots allowed them the luxury.

Wasps, a big-city team playing in small-town High Wycombe, have necessarily become their own community - a community too tiny to thrive in isolation.

For reasons of survival, they extend the hand of friendship to those outsiders they consider worthy.

Gatland is, or was, one of those outsiders. But the New Zealander's own experience as a front-line player was with an equally unfashionable, close-knit team - the Waikato of Kevin Greene and John Mitchell - and it equipped him perfectly for a coach's life at Wasps.

He recognised much of himself in the players he found there, and they saw large parts of themselves in him. This was more than a meeting of minds.

It was a meeting of traditions, of philosophies, of spirits. Gatland may ultimately come to mean as much to the champions as Dean Richards meant to Leicester.

Ah yes... Richards. Leicester lost an entire pack of forwards to World Cup duty last autumn and as a result, they struggled for results at Premiership level.

It would have been a minor miracle had they not done so. But there was some other force at work in the crumbling citadel of Welford Road, and there was more than a whiff of the rotten about it.

Under their shambling great folk hero of a director of rugby, the Tigers had won a quartet of Premierships and two Heineken Cups.

Yet four years of unprecedented success could not protect him from the consequences of a season and a half of mediocrity.

Richards' departure was the saddest, most bitter moment of the campaign - if only a third of the rumours of back-stabbing in high places were correct, the entire club should hang its head. Yet it must also be recorded that Leicester have not lost a serious game of rugby since the palace coup was completed.

Martin Johnson's return as captain, Geordan Murphy's recovery from injury and Jaco van der Westhuyzen's reclaiming of his positional birthright as an outside-half of unusual daring were at the heart of the renaissance, but John Wells must also be credited for his resourceful coaching and tactical judgement.

Leicester will be a mighty force next season, as will Wasps and Bath, always assuming the latter sign themselves a couple of wings.

Having dominated everyone else during their golden ages, these three will now seek to dominate each other. The view from ringside should be terrific.

- INDEPENDENT