KEY POINTS:
Disputes in Europe about loyalty to club or country since rugby went professional have been festering spats compared with the current full-blown stoush.
Threats from English and French clubs to boycott next year's Heineken Cup (their Super 14) have massive global implications for the sport.
Remember this is a World Cup year - an ideal time for concerted action, as it was in South Africa in 1995 when deals about a rebel WRC professional circuit were sorted, only to be overtaken by an establishment counter-offer.
The discontent of major European clubs with the national unions after a decade of professional rugby has got to such a level they want to set up a rival competition. After a few skirmishes, this is a battle they are prepared to fight. The clubs want a larger share of television, sponsorship and commercial arrangements, and claim they are due a bigger financial return from the Heineken Cup.
They want to move ahead and claim they are impeded by the involvement of unions like England and France. Breakaway clubs would not be bound by import quota restrictions imposed on them at the moment, with huge offers likely to be made to New Zealanders and others to join a rebel tournament.
Toulouse, Biarritz, Leicester and Saracens are some envisaging themselves as European superclubs. They will have no interest in the grassroots of the game or the international calendar. If those senior clubs break away, they would remove from an already-weak England squad about 90 per cent of their players.
With a player exodus from the Six Nations series, South Africa could be invited into the vacuum, and their players would also be targeted by the rival superclubs in Europe. That scenario would further impact on the game in New Zealand, with a reduction in the quality of the Super 14 and Tri-Nations series.
The All Blacks already take mix-and-match squads to Europe for end-of-year tours and would be tested even less by nations undercut by the superclubs.
It would bring an already tatty international game to its knees.
World Cup year is becoming an increasingly dangerous part of the rugby landscape for the game's administrators. Competitors have a stage to plot and the tournaments are so domineering they provoke the sort of thinking which devalues international rugby.
The sort of talk we had over the departure of Aaron Mauger, Chris Jack and Sam Tuitupou - give them a few seasons overseas before they return for a shot at the next World Cup - only devalues international rugby and perpetuates the notion that the only important time on the calendar is once every four years.
