Loose Pass

This week we will be mostly concerning ourselves with the other DC and faking it…

Welcome to Loose Pass – our weekly assortment of disjointed thoughts. This week we will be mostly concerning ourselves with Danny Cipriani and faking it…

Looks like Martin Johnson has finally got the hang of management.

Sick of fending off criticism concerning omissions, he's decided to take every single rugby player in England on tour Down Under.

And not content with that, he's also added the likes of Hendre Fourie, Shontayne Hape and Dan Ward-Smith. Matt Damon can consider himself very unlucky to have missed the cut.

But despite its size, Johnno's army looks as green as the motley crew that has just descended on Westminster.

Sure, it's great to see some new faces in the touring squad, but now is the time to bed down rather than to experiment.

We're just one year out from Rugby World Cup 2011 and we still have no idea what England's first-choice XV looks like.

This is not normal procedure. Look at the contrast with Wales. Warren Gatland will select fewer than 30 players for June's games. The message is abundantly clear: we're happy with our core squad, now it's time to fine tune. And the same goes for Scotland.

Meanwhile, their English counterparts will be busy putting names to faces.

And thus England have managed to turn what should be a vast advantage into a crippling handicap.

Blessed with huge numbers of professional players (from home and from abroad) they chop and change rather than entrust.

They have no qualms about sending a player into exile for one bad game because they know there are others waiting in the wings – and at no time since 2003 has the merry-go-round slowed sufficiently to allow units to solidify.

England must start to build a team rather than a squad.

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Massive factual error in the preceding snippet, as we're sure our eagle-eyed regulars will have spotted. Not every rugby player in England has been selected to tour.

Martin Johnson's pick of the senior squad and the Saxons confirms that Danny Cipriani is – at best – the 71st most talented player on the RFU's books.

“We felt we'd give the opportunity to players who were going to be playing here in September,” said Johnno of the matter, simultaneously cutting the debate short and confirming (presumably) that Tom Palmer, James Haskell, Steve Thompson, Ollie Smith and Jonny Wilkinson will all be returning to the Guinness Premiership in the new season.

The jury remains out as to whether Cipriani is a misunderstood superstar or merely a petulant brat. Either way, Loose Pass is beginning to feel for him.

Mischief-makers within Australian rugby circles are already touting him as a future Wallaby, and the idea is really not that far-fetched. Who could possibly blame him should he choose to go for gold?

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We should really turn to a new subject at this point, but to hell with that. Let's continue to bag England's officials – they make it so easy for us.

Take Mark McCafferty, for instance.

You might recall the boss of Premier Rugby cropping up a few weeks back with talk of ring-fencing the Guinness Premiership and dropping the drop in “two or three years”.

As it turns out, Premier Rugby doesn't have the power to approve such changes even if relegation from the top flight wasn't protected until 2016, which it is.

So McCafferty has chosen to charge at a new windmill: artificial pitches for all Guinness Premiership games “to ensure consistent surfaces in the hope that they will lead to higher quality games”.

He added: “I don't see it in place for next season but it could happen later.”

We won't give this plan to improve “the quality of the product” the vitriol it so richly deserves as we're sure it will get shot down by a higher authority then Premier Rugby – and it's not hard to find one of those.

But if the elements really interfere with the spectacle of rugby, it follows that McCafferty would also advocate the removal of all those stupid trees that conspire to deny us “higher quality” golf – and that's one Premier Rugby plan that Loose Pass would happily endorse.

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All that said, we're sure the Irish would roll out the green carpet if they could.

It's not the Parisian date they had planned, but Leinster and Munster will do battle this weekend at piddly RDS … whilst across the way nestles New Lansdowne Road (we will NOT be calling it the Aviva Stadium) just a few grassblades short of completion.

Compiled by Andy Jackson