Faking it

This week we will be mostly concerning ourselves with season structure and faking it…

Welcome to Loose Pass – our weekly assortment of musings, mutterings, tickled fancies and disjointed thoughts. This week we will be mostly concerning ourselves with season structure and faking it…

As we have made clear in this column in the past, we're dead against the rise of play-acting in the great game of rugby.

It therefore follows that we should be happy that Harlequins wing Tom Williams has been busted for “fabricating” an injury in last season's Heineken Cup quarter-final, but we are most decidedly not.

You can remind yourselves of the ins and outs that led to the European Rugby Cup's decision here , but we'd like to skip to the case: whilst Quins boss Dean Richards plus two members of the club's medical team “had misconduct complaints dismissed”, Williams has been suspended for 12 months.

Eeh?

Let's get this straight. A young wing, himself recently off the bench and into the action, decided to chomp down on a 'blood' capsule that he had chosen to stash on his person when he realised that his side had lost their two main kickers and that his superiors would send back on a strapped-up Nick Evans in his place.

What's more, he did all this all off his own back.

What a team player! What foresight! What a joke!

If Williams was the lone gunman, who was he winking at as he departed the grassy knoll?

And how did the medic that attended to him not release he was spouting food dye from his mouth? What kind of a quack is he?

And how did the wing know he would be replaced by a match-winning kicker rather than, as is the custom, a wing?

Come on, Deano – it's time to 'fess up.

The ridiculously lengthy ban meted out to Williams – you only get eight weeks for eye-gouging, remember – is surely an invitation for the Quins hierarchy to come forward and admit their guilt.

By keeping silent they are effectively throwing a young man and his rugby career to the wolves.

We await their next move with interest – and very palpable foreboding.

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Without wanting to influence the decision of Deano and co (come forward and confess or we'll put a plague on your houses) let's rewatch the incident in all its faux-gory glory.

Forgive the French commentary, but this cut of the footage includes shots of a limp Evans warming up prior to getting the nod, that Ronaldo-esque wink in super slow-mo, and what appears to be the jettisoning of something unworldly from Williams' mouth as he took his leave whilst in the company of the so-called medic…

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With the spirit of the British & Irish Lions brought back to purring life by the deft hand of Ian McGeechan and his cohorts, it's now time for rugby's administrators to step up to the plate.

The Lions had the tools to do the job in South Africa, of that there is no question.

What they lacked was the will of their superiors and a requisite framework in which to operate.

The cramped European fixture schedules allowed then little more than a week to prepare for the most gruelling rugby adventure on offer, and without a more sympathetic calendar the Lions are destined to extend their run of series defeats to an ignominious, future-threatening four.

Various commentators have grappled with the problem, punting pre-tour games against the big clubs and provinces of Britain and Ireland as a possible solution.

Others have raised the possibility of playing a big-money match in Hong Kong en route to Australia or inviting Argentina to have another bash at the embryonic tourists.

Loose Pass believes these ideas to be misguided.

Kicking off with a big game upsets the momentum of a tour – it should build to a roaring crescendo rather than go off with a half-cocked bang.

Moreover and most importantly, throwing together a side for a high-profile warm-up game does little for the bonding process.

That pre-tour draw with the Pumas in 2005 actually did the squad more damage than good in that it galvanised Sir Clive Woodward's premeditated vision of what his eventual Test side would look like.

All the Lions really need is an extra week to get to know one another. That's not much to ask, but you'd be surprised: the game's administrators makes Bumble the Beadle look like Father Christmas.

Even the week granted to the Lions of 2009 was too much for some, with Northampton Saints barring their sole representative, Euan Murray, from a pre-tour get-together on the grounds that their needs were greater.

In fairness, the Saints had a point – they still had a final to navigate when the Lions began to prowl.

So the solution must surely lie in shorten the season, and pruning it back could be easier than most administrators would make us believe.

The forthcoming Guinness Premiership season loses three rounds of matches to the Six Nations; the Magners League shuts up shop completely during the Championship.

More bizarrely, there are also breaks for the near-meaningless November Tests.

Playing through the Six Nations alone would shorten the English season by three weeks and the Celtic season by five – more than the enough time to allow the Lions to mount a credible challenge.

Administrators would cite reduced earnings for the clubs if they were made to go head to head with Test matches. But stats reveal that the opposite appears to be true.

A total of 80,337 fans attended the round of Guinness Premiership games on the weekend in which Ireland sealed the Grand Slam and England and Scotland contested the Calcutta Cup. Last year's average attendance for a round of GP matches was 70,851.

Indeed, fans are finding that club rugby on Six Nations weekends amounts to an irresistible double-header with clubs cleaning up on beer sales alone as the punters decamp from the stands to televisions in the bar.

There are those who would claim that the absence of their club's Test stars puts them at a disadvantage during Test weekends, but rugby is rapidly become a squad affair and the Six Nations offers tomorrow's stars the chance to shine for their clubs. Heaven knows they need that exposure, and it makes for refreshing viewing.

So where's the problem with shorten the season? Well, the truth is that there's not much money to be made in allowing the Lions to disappear from sight for three weeks to scheme and plot.

But what if some of