Loose Pass

This week we will be mostly concerning ourselves with squads for the Six Nations Championship, Mathieu Bastareaud and the Doddie Weir Cup.

Over the top

Ready yourselves for a Six Nations like no other.

European rugby is on the up and we are on the countdown to Rugby World Cup 2019, with just over 600 days to go before that opener in Tokyo.

This is when the cream begins to rise to the top. Now is the time to separate the wheat from the chaff, to start bedding down partnerships and fine-tune the moving parts.

Still a little early for that, you say? Well, the England XV selected for the opening game of the 2002 Six Nations boasted 10 of the men who, 600 days hence, reacted to the first whistle of the final game of RWC 2003 – and nine of them were wearing the same numbers on their backs.

And even back in 2002 those names were familiar in your mouth as household words: Johnson the captain, Wilkinson the fly-half, Robinson and Cohen, Hill and Back, Greenwood and Tindall.

Distant times, of course. We live in far stranger days, totally estranged from quaint notions of continuity and stability.

Will Dylan Hartley be captain in Japan? It’s doubtful he’ll even start next week. And who’ll be manning England’s midfield? Have we yet to be even formally introduced?

These uncertainties flow, in part, from the proclivities of Eddie Jones. His immense success stems from his determination to never allow players to get too comfortable. Jerseys are borrowed, he has long insisted, never owned.

But the main reason behind the chopping and changing is slight more prosaic: it’s just hard to grow a team’s spine when it’s being smashed to pieces on a constant basis.

Yes, we’re back to our perpetual bugbear of too much rugby. An epidemic of injury means the forthcoming edition of the Six Nations will be marked by an absence of big names. We’re not quite in ‘2nd XV tournament’ territory yet, but we’re not far off.

Those of you who have paid good money to watch the likes of Billy Vunipola, Morgan Parra, Rhys Priestland, Jonathan Davies, Garry Ringrose, Sam Warburton and Elliot Daly will need to familiarise yourselves with the likes of Josh Adams, Felix Lambey, Jon Welsh, Gary Graham, Adam Beard, Quinn Roux and James Davies.

England are without 14 major names, with Henry Slade joining that throng within the last 24 hours. France are without at least 12 first-choice operators, Wales are missing 11 (including, at the last count, both their world-class pivots) and Ireland have ten unavailable through injury.

Scotland and Italy are both in a slightly brighter place in terms of available personnel, although the dark blues will struggle to muster a front-row fit for the challenges ahead. The good news for Italy is that, at the time of going to press, Sergio Parisse is fit.

The powers-that-be want us to believe that the current crisis is a bit of an anomaly rather than a trend, that not much has changed since the stable old days of 2003, that there’s no fathomable reason why this particular set of limp horses react so badly to being flogged.

But the make-up of the squads named for the Six Nations – particularly England’s – give us a rather gruesome glimpse of what rugby is to become.

He might not admit it, but it’s obvious that Jones has fathomed that whilst once you could fight a campaign with a platoon of soldiers, you now need a company – if not a whole battalion.

Future injuries – long lists of them – are factored into the thinking. The likes of Zach Mercer, Lewis Boyce and Harry Mallinder aren’t being readied for RWC 2023 – chances are that they’ll be forced over the top before spring’s first daffodil blooms. They need to be ready today, not tomorrow.

Indeed, there’s only one ‘apprentice’ left in the squad, which rather means that the rest of them have been promoted without having seen any action. That sort of meteoric rise through the ranks of the military is brought about by one thing, and one thing only: constant, unending slaughter.

So perhaps we should just stop bleating on about player welfare and accept that it’s now a blood sport. There’ll always be someone keen to fill a shirt, and if the blazers don’t care who that it is, why should we?

Enjoy the show.

Project Weir

Okay, we’ve just declared that we will stop caring a damn about how much rugby is being played, but please allow us just a few more lines on the subject.

Our ire is centred on the new-fangled Doddie Weir Cup – an utter abomination.

You hate us, don’t you? How can we be possibly by riled by the decision to honour such a great man in such a wonderful way?

Well, that’s the exact response the organisers – the SRU and WRU – have ready for anyone who dares question the sanity of adding an additional Test between Wales and Scotland to an already chock-a-block calendar.

In our defence, we would have actively supported the initiative had they promised all financial proceeds to Weir’s fight against motor neuron disease. Even the promise of half the proceeds would have won us over. A quarter, even. Perhaps 10%?

No. All they have promised is the actual cup and “related contributions”, whatever that means.

The real driving-force behind this game was identified by WRU boss Martyn Phillips at the launch: “We need four international matches in our autumn calendar in order to provide vital funds for the future sustainability of the game in Wales.”

So some credit due for his honesty, and for having the guts to partially emerge from behind Doddie Weir – even if he did go on to suggest that his finance-raising occasion could go on to become an annual fixture.

Surely the proper way to honour Weir is to do it within the confines of the Six Nations. There’s where we’ll remember him; that’s where he stood tall and proud. Add the cup and “related contributions” to the existing show.

Staging some sort of faux-memorial in November seems cynical and slightly tawdry.

There’s a way to honour Weir and this is patently not it. To borrow a line from the legend himself, as spoken in the seminal ‘Living With Lions’ documentary, this is very much a case of “mish-taken identity”.

Just deserts

As you might have gathered, this column is not always very supportive of the game’s blazers. But in handing Toulon’s Mathieu Bastareaud a three-week ban for verbal abuse, they got it exactly right.

We’ll concede that we are in the absolute minority on this point. Many believed he deserved a very lengthy ban for hurling a homophobic slur towards a fellow player during a recent Champions Cup game.

We disagree. A lengthy suspension would have carried the suggestion that the game has a deep-seated issue with homophobia and needs robust deterrents to stamp it out. That is not the case.

Furthermore, a ban of headline-seeking length would have only served to weaponise that prehistoric word in the minds of impressionable young fans. It’s from a bygone era – let’s just leave it there.

And let’s not forget from whence the slur sprang.

Bastareaud has admitted to being an idiot, and you’d be hard pressed mounting a case to the contrary: this is not his first rodeo in the arena of utter stupidity.

Some allowance also needs to be given to the fact that this was a French-speaker fumbling about for an insult in English. It’s pretty obvious he was oblivious to the weight that this one word held.

But if you thing that his ban carries insufficient hurt, think again. To be sitting there, fit, among his injured teammates must sting to the core.

And if that’s not punishment enough for you, rest assured that club and country coaches are ripping daily strips off him – and so they should.

Loose Pass is compiled by former Planet Rugby editor Andy Jackson