Category: Premiership Rugby

Free-scoring Bears face Harlequins knowing a slip-up could open the door for local rivals Gloucester

There will be tries. That is hardly a revolutionary prediction in a sport that has long since rained down on us the 21st century’s manna of entertainment at all costs, but even by those standards this weekend’s last round of the Premiership promises bounty.

The science of prediction is at best hit and miss, but one blind alley all too many “experts” get lost down is consideration of tactics, gameplans and the like, when all that really matters is a team’s motivation. Purity of desire is a special ingredient in a side’s prospects for any individual match. This weekend we have five matches, and they all might be summarised as a team with something to play for versus a team with nothing.

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Under Johann van Graan’s philosophy the West Country giants believe they are on the cusp of a return to the top

Trophies. They are like bloody buses. Or at least that is what Bath fans must be hoping. They wait 17 years for one, and along come …

We are about to find out how many. One has just been. The Premiership Cup pulled up in March to fairly inconsequential fanfare. But it looks as if another, the Challenge Cup, is waiting just a stop away, before we turn our attention to a third, the Premiership, timetabled for the middle of June – but you know what these bloody buses are like.

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Northampton and Bath have a chance to restore English rugby to its pedestal, but French foes will have other ideas

It has not happened very often. Just once in the past 20 years, to be precise. Winning a single trophy is hard enough but English clubs hoisting aloft both the Champions Cup and Challenge Cup in the same season would be a proper rarity. Other than the Covid-afflicted year of 2020 when Exeter Chiefs and Bristol Bears prevailed in mostly empty stadiums, the last time there was a Premiership double was in May 2004.

Back then Wasps and Harlequins were the happy couple, beating Toulouse and Montferrand respectively. This week also features two Anglo-French finals with Northampton facing Bordeaux-Bègles in the main event and Bath tackling Lyon in Friday night’s amuse bouche. A measure of the challenge facing the English duo is that French clubs have hoovered up seven of the past eight available trophies, with South Africa collecting the other.

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• Bath 43-15 Leicester
• Dunn scores try in 184th Premiership match for Bath

It could yet be that these two teams will meet again in this season’s Premiership final at Twickenham. If so Leicester will have to look for some different solutions. This meeting of the leagues’s top two was compared to a “heavyweight boxing clash” by Bath’s head of rugby, Johann van Graan, but even the ability of Leicester’s defence to soak up plenty of punishment could not save them in the end.

Bath’s first-choice forwards are increasingly taking no prisoners and this seven-try victory on a glorious early summer evening was the latest reason to fancy they will eventually end up as champions. The highlight was a memorable score from Tom Dunn, setting a new club record for the most Premiership appearances in the famous blue, black and white striped jersey. The hooker’s extravagant dummy and subsequent 20-metre sprint to the line would have been collector’s items even in a game of social tag rugby

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Research shows they make a major difference to 2.28% of positions, while play-off semi-finals also look redundant

The business end of the domestic season has arrived and the Premiership and United Rugby Championship tables, as ever, are being carefully scrutinised. Two from Bristol, Sale and Saracens are now vying to make the Premiership playoffs with two games left while the race for the URC top eight will boil down to the final weekend.

At which point some know-all will intone the well-worn mantra: bonus points will be crucial. And we’ll all nod solemnly and start contemplating how Team X or Team Y can best set about scoring either four tries or losing by seven points or fewer. Without necessarily stopping to think whether the cold, hard mathematics support that supposition – or indeed ever have done.

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A 79-17 defeat for the 2020 champions’ set the alarm bells ringing and the ‘embarrassed’ chair is pulling no punches

How swiftly the sporting wheel can turn. Less than five years ago Exeter were the Double-winning darlings of English club rugby, their fairytale rise ranking alongside Brian Clough’s Nottingham Forest, Sir Alex Ferguson’s Aberdeen and Wimbledon’s Crazy Gang as the most romantic success stories in British team sport.

And now? Second bottom of the Premiership table, 79 points conceded at Gloucester last time out, coaches being summarily jettisoned, the chairman storming into the dressing room. The one thing everyone in Devon can agree on is that the season’s end cannot come quickly enough.

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• Director of rugby backs plans for franchise league
• Expansion would end promotion and relegation

The Northampton director of rugby, Phil Dowson, fears the sport is “sleepwalking” towards another club going bust and endorsed plans for the Premiership to become a franchised league on the basis it would be more appealing to investors.

Premiership and Rugby Football Union executives have drawn up plans for an “expansion” league, akin to a franchise model, that would allow for teams to be added to the current 10 top flight clubs should they meet certain criteria. The RFU chief executive, Bill Sweeney, revealed that there is the possibility of expanding for the start of next season.

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• Newcastle 34-35 Northampton
• Defending champions and bottom club share 10 tries

Northampton survived a late scare to snatch a narrow 35-34 victory over Newcastle at Kingston Park.

A thrilling encounter saw Craig Wright cancel out Jamie Blamire’s opening try and after Brett Connon sent the Falcons ahead again from the tee, Northampton seized control just before half-time with Luke Green, Fin Smith and debutant Will Glister all scoring.

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Second to seventh all play each other this weekend but European calendar threatens to stall momentum

The Premiership season is rounding the final bend and entering the home straight. Organisers like to call this point in the campaign “The Run-in” and they could hardly have wished for a better set of fixtures this weekend to begin it with. Sixth host fourth when Saracens entertain Gloucester, fifth go to seventh with Sale travelling to Harlequins and on Sunday, second and third lock horns with Bristol facing Leicester.

As was the case last season, the race for the playoffs is shaping up to be a blanket finish. Bath are out in front in first but with five matches remaining, only four points separate Leicester in third and Harlequins in seventh. Bristol are a further five ahead in the runners-up spot and with second to seventh all playing each other this weekend, through rose-tinted glasses it is the perfect way to showcase the sprint finish.

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• Newcastle director of rugby given six-match suspension
• Told TMO that he ‘should retire’

Steve Diamond’s season-ending ban was meted out because he called a group of match‑day officials “cunts” before telling the television match official he should retire.

The Newcastle director of rugby was given a six-match suspension last week after a disciplinary ­hearing into an incident that took place in the dying throes of the Falcons’ late defeat by fellow strugglers Exeter last month.

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• Director wants fewer club games in international window
• Cardiff on the brink of entering administration

English club rugby is being undermined by a “dysfunctional” fixture schedule that is making it harder to compete with other top European sides, according to Northampton’s director of rugby, Phil Dowson. Saints are the only English team still involved in the Champions Cup this season but Dowson believes Premiership teams are being handicapped by their own domestic calendar.

Northampton were crowned Premiership champions last season and also made the Champions Cup semi-finals, but Dowson believes it will require a “monumental effort” for any Premiership club to challenge successfully on two fronts given the current structure and salary cap restrictions.

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• Loans scrutinised by public accounts committee
• ‘Gap in oversight’ over £123.8m paid to rugby teams

There remains a “high degree of uncertainty” over whether tens of millions of pounds paid to rugby union clubs and other sports teams during the Covid-19 pandemic will ever be repaid, the House of Commons’ public accounts committee has warned.

In a report published on Wednesday, the committee also criticised the Department for Culture, Media and Sport for being “overly optimistic” in believing it will recover most of the £474m it paid out to 120 organisations in the sport and culture sectors to help them survive the impact of the pandemic.

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• Bath 42-26 Gloucester
• Leaders score six tries against West Country rivals

Bath cemented their position as the team to catch in the Premiership race this season with an entertaining victory against their West Country rivals Gloucester. Assisted by the return of their chief playmaker, Finn Russell, after the Six Nations, the hosts scored six tries and, in a neat example of symmetry, are six points clear of the field with six regular-season fixtures to play.

It has already been a good month for Bath, who won the Premiership Cup last weekend to secure their first trophy for 17 years, and here was further evidence of the significant squad depth at their disposal.

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The English top flight has clouds on its horizon but it returns with Derby Weekend full of promise and intrigue

Premiership Rugby executives have been picking the brains of their counterparts at World Wrestling Entertainment of late. The bad news is that rugby union’s version of the Royal Rumble is not in the pipeline, the good is that there is no better organisation when it comes to selling its stars and the Premiership has evidently been doing its homework over how to follow suit.

The findings were instructive. Better to encourage profiles to develop organically than force growth and it was interesting to hear the Rugby Football Union (RFU) chief executive, Bill Sweeney, suggest recently that Netflix might have mis-stepped by opening this year’s Six Nations documentary with an episode all about Marcus Smith, Twickenham’s golden boy, buying a car. Rugby is not football was the gist of Sweeney’s argument in his latest podcast appearance.

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• Steve Diamond says bailout won’t keep Falcons alive
• Ealing and Coventry fail to meet promotion criteria

The survival of Newcastle Falcons as a professional rugby team will require more than just a one-off £4m bailout from the remaining nine Premiership clubs, according to a senior Falcons employee. Steve Diamond, their director of rugby, has confirmed Newcastle may have to negotiate a potential short-term loan to participate in next season’s Premiership, raising fresh doubts about the club’s longer-term viability.

Diamond has already been forced to put a freeze on player recruitment for next season following confirmation the Falcons have been discussing a possible central loan if they fail to secure fresh investment between now and mid-June. Their longtime backer Semore Kurdi has been actively seeking a buyer for the club since last year.

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