Defeat of Clermont in European Champions Cup owed as much to team ethos as individual flair – Mark McCall’s side pulled together when going got toughChris Ashton stumbled slightly when he was asked why he was leaving Saracens for Toulon at the end of the season. The most direct of runners took a circuitous route as he pondered the answer to a question which was inviting him to explain why he was swapping the dominant club in Europe for the one they had supplanted and which was on its third head coach of the campaign.Ashton, like David Strettle two years ago, is not so much leaving Saracens as England, frustrated at his international isolation and two long bans in the...
How British & Irish Lions could use magic of a team orchestrated by their coach Mark McCall to produce stunning, incisive finishingEveryone talks about winning being a habit. In rugby it is more complicated than that: nothing comes easy and conquering Everest always has to be done the hard way. Not so long ago Saracens were a team – and a club – with recurring altitude sickness; these days, in Europe particularly, they are the high and mighty masters of all they survey.Two successive European crowns certainly elevates them to select status. Only Leicester, Leinster and Toulon have won back-to-back titles and no one has ever stayed unbeaten for 18 games on the trot. If Toulon are the only side...
With the George North saga, Dylan Hartley’s suspension and a poor run of results, there is not a lot of jaunty, jazzy marching in at Franklin’s GardensFor a grand old club with an enviable, newly enlarged stadium, the modern history of Northampton Saints RFC is strangely fraught. Every team has its highs and lows but the Saints are currently besieged on all sides, trapped by unhappy accidents and assorted misjudgments of their own making. The George North saga, Dylan Hartley’s suspension, looming European oblivion: there is not a lot of jaunty, jazzy marching in at Franklin’s Gardens right now.These have been particularly testing days since their 37-10 home drubbing to Leinster last Friday. Their England captain Hartley has been banned...
The dominance of Leinster, Munster, Glasgow and Ulster in the Champions Cup was a result of performances as eye-catching as their resultsSo let’s just examine the old scoreboard. Leinster, Munster, Ulster and Glasgow played Northampton, Leicester, Clermont Auvergne and Racing Métro in the European Rugby Champions Cup last weekend and the supposed English and French heavyweights, as they say on television sports-news bulletins, may want to look away now. Adding the four results together makes for distinctly one-sided reading.So here are those stats in full: Pro12 4 Premiership/Top14 0. Tries scored 16, tries conceded 7. Points for 137, points against 56. A star-studded Wasps did beat Connacht at home on Sunday but even that was less than straightforward. How different...
Dylan Hartley’s greatest opponent is himself, Jamie George and Owen Farrell can both replace him and it was a good weekend for the Irish If Dylan Hartley had not been sent off we would all be talking about Leinster’s excellence. Perhaps we still should be; even when they were down to their third-choice fly-half the Irish side looked revitalised, for which credit must go both to the players and, in particular, their reshuffled coaching panel. The contrast with Northampton’s flat-footed start was particularly glaring, as the home skipper Tom Wood made abundantly clear after his side’s 37-10 home drubbing. Ultimately though, Hartley’s 58th-minute red card for a forearm smash to the back of Sean O’Brien’s head was the kind of...