This week we will mostly be concerning ourselves with advantage on the pitch, advantages off the pitch, England’s cucumber sandwich wars and the kick-off of the European Cup…

Long, long advantage

This one has been touched on before in this column, but with players, coaches and other facilitators increasingly urged to ensure the attacking side gets all the advantage it can, Loose Pass found itself looking at what was surely the outer limit of advantage.

The Stormers got a penalty advantage almost on the centre spot of the pitch. Play went on, and Manie Libbok toed through one of those deft one-motion grubbers that seem to have become such a feature of the Stormers’ attack this season.

This one was regathered and offloaded again, leading to what was a clean break and a two-on-two situation. Leolin Zas opted to go ‘double grubble’ instead of keeping the ball in hand, but the second grubber, a good 35 metres ahead of the initial advantage, was not as effective and was regathered this time by Marius Domon on Toulon.

Whereupon Karl Dickson blew his whistle and brought the play back for the penalty. 35 metres of advantage? One clean line break successful and strike players past the defensive line and in open pasture?

Alain Rolland’s infamous line to a player who bemoaned his team not getting the scrum from advantage after he had sliced a kick into touch: “I am not responsible for your incompetence” seems no longer to apply sometimes; often enough the advantage seems to be either you can score or come back for the penalty. It’s too much. Players need to be given more responsibility for competence.

Lorenzetti’s curious demand

He’s a polarising chap and he’s hardly endeared himself to the masses down the years with some of his broadsides at players who he deems not up to the price, but to hear Jacky Lorenzetti bemoan the high Top 14 salary cap this week should be a talking point.

As English and especially Welsh club rugby lurches from one financial desperate situation to the next, the impression has always been that the money is better on offer in France because the French clubs can afford it more – or even rolling in it.

Not necessarily, despite many of the clubs (Lorenzetti’s Racing not included) having their stadia both filled to overflowing every week and getting a healthy dollop of income relief from the simple fact that said stadia are owned and run by the municipalities. French clubs are losing money every bit as fast as their cross-channel counterparts, and while the general size of the league, audience and television income tends to be larger, giving clubs a more stable foundation, well, it doesn’t just grow on trees.

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But most importantly, this is by some distance the most successful domestic league in the world. It’s rightly lauded for its colour, quality and depth. If 10 of the owners in such a league are saying that the sums do not add up any more, then it is clear that the game has grown beyond its limits.

‘Man the leather chair barricades’

Meanwhile in England, the RFU continues to labour under the pressures of the ambiguity of cutting 40-odd jobs one minute and paying the CEO a seven-figure salary (not to mention the deep bonus pot shared among the other execs) the next.

Now an assortment of well-tailored skeletons has emerged from as fine a set of carved mahogany closets as could be imagined and further damned their successors for the perceived greed and incapability, calling for them to leave their posts.

Leaving aside the amusing image this calls up of a phalanx of former RFU execs storming a current board meeting armed with plates of sharpened prawn sandwiches and cucumber spears, it should be borne in mind that it was Francis Baron and his buddies who turned the RFU around from a similar financial position it is in now to a profitable business, and who have since seen their work undone.

It was also Baron and former chairman Graeme Cattermole who were stripped of their privilege membership facilities by the RFU six and a bit years ago, for daring to call out the pre-Sweeney administration for their financial irresponsibility, a situation that has not improved.

But surely this isn’t just a ruse to get their tickets back?

Under the weather

A warm welcome back to the Investec Champions Cup. Warm? Well, not really… windy, sodden and horrible cold (Durban and Cape Town notwithstanding) all came together to greet the teams for European competition this weekend.

While there were plenty of good games, you do have to wonder about the tournament’s current slot in the season.

In the good old days you’d have had the opening matches in the middle weeks of October, with players gearing up for the Test window and having shed all possible early-season rust, with higher chances of a bit of Indian summer – especially in France – to help the positive play along. All on one easy-to-find mainstream broadcasting channel.

And now? Given the increasing number of Test matches, you’ve got some pretty knackered Test players asked to pick themselves up and go again, kicking off a tournament that is supposed to benchmark the best of the best but at a time of year which, as this weekend proved, can be levelled by the weather.

The home and away double-headers which used to make for such fun in December are also gone now, with teams not even playing all the other teams in their pool any more. Instead, that’s been replaced by the random travel factor, one that means Exeter have to travel to Durban and Belfast, while Bath only travel to Dublin and Treviso. Teeth used to be gnashed in the old days when a pool was perceived as easy, but these days teams can have home semi-final draws wrapped up by round three of the pool matches.

The quality of the product remains, but the production, packaging and product placement are still not what they used to be.

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Src: Planetrugby.com - https://www.planetrugby.com/news/loose-pass-champions-cup-under-the-weather-as-several-facets-questioned-and-the-outer-limit-of-advantage