Loose Pass: Exploitation, salary cap and Europe’s curse

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This week we will mostly be concerning ourselves with the exploitation of new rules, salary cap moves and the opportunity available in Europe’s curse…

Anyone for tennis?

It wasn’t long ago that Loose Pass was very happy with the 50-22 rule. It “showed how a good kick, even if itself not the most exciting part of the game, can create more in the way of attacking situations,” we said, back in the heady days of mid-September, when men were men, Rassie was a waterboy, and Marcus Smith’s debut was just a glint in Eddie Jones’ eye.

We also followed that up with: “…it will be interesting to see whether it becomes over-used, indeed whether it becomes an excuse to hoof the ball hopefully downfield in a game’s latter stages, but the benefits even from one successful kick were there to see on Sunday.”

In Saturday’s showpiece game, the benefits were not there to see for anyone not wearing a Leicester shirt. Granted, Bordeaux made far too many mistakes, not all of them forced, and did not deserve to win.

But the tactics… how many minutes in that game – and it was not the only one – were spent by the full-backs and fly-halves, with a couple of occasional guest appearances from other backs, hoofing the ball from one 22 to the other in the vague hope that someone at the back might be sleeping and let the ball bounce out for an attacking throw?

Heavy pitches, cold days and nights and elements of Safety First, This Is The Big One all contributed, but in both France and England, and certainly at times in the United Rugby Championship, all of the teams have played rugby far, far more constructively and positively than they did at the weekend, most of them in games of near-equal stature.

Paradoxically, the best game of the weekend was the one in which the one team had almost two entire XVs missing from its selection squad, hosting another that did have two XVs missing from its selection squad. Wasps v Munster was terrific fun. Few other games were. Leicester v Bordeaux was terribly anti-climactic considering it should have been the best of England against the best of France.

But the endless kicking has returned. It’s better marshalled now, with referees and their assistants micro-managing every chaser so much that around 25 of the players in the match shuffle nervously back and forth between the 10 metre lines while long-range missiles fly overhead, being shouted at to stay still and thus stay onside, but all that seems to have achieved is that the kickers have more time to get to the edge of the 22 before they can kick it longer.

Ah well, the 50-22 rule. It was good while it lasted.

Too many Kochs

It’s as striking a mid-season announcement as you could wish for, but Vincent Koch’s departure from Saracens to Wasps is indicative of two things: firstly, that Saracens really, really want to stay under the salary cap this time, and secondly, that said salary cap might do English club rugby a really good job.

It has been a source of much controversy down the seasons, with many a billionaire capitalist frustrated at his inability to put up barriers to entry around his hegemonic squad of well-paid henchmen and many a club bemoaning the fact that the French are not so restrained.

Yet even in the days of French clubs making players ‘the first million-euro-a-year-man’, French clubs were not impossible to beat. Twice as much outlay certainly did not lead to twice as much success. Only Toulon really managed to buy success, and look at them now.

Fact is, if salary caps spread the jam across multiple teams, two things can happen. Firstly, teams will be playing many, many more tight games, which might cause lots of kicking a la above, but will surely serve both clubs and nation well when it comes to ‘finals rugby’.

Secondly, and by dint of this, academy products will be better developed and better looked after, because they have to be, because well, if you produce the best players from within, they are far, far better value.

The counter-argument to that is, of course, the Kyle Sinckler problem: a player who has risen through the ranks at one club his entire career forced to move away because his improved status and market value means that to keep him, his team must sacrifice too much salary cap value and compromise too much elsewhere within the squad.

But this is where we’d like to see an important change made to the salary cap: make home-grown players such as Sinckler an exemption – or limit the salary cap value a home-grown player can use up. Koch’s salary counts fully under the cap, so he has to move on and play wherever his salary fits, but if he and Sinckler were paid, say 200k, only half of that would count to Sinckler’s team’s cap.

Spreading the market jam is welcome, but home-made should only be served at home.

European troubles

European Cup Rugby seems to be in a harder place than most under Covid. A very limited number of games, a squashed format, the perils of continental travel, the myriad of conflicting rules…

Yet this format just doesn’t work for us. Given the limited number of weekends available and the apparent desire of all to see do-or-die, mano-a-mano, winner-takes-all scenarios week in, week out, wouldn’t it be a fun experiment to just run the European Cup one year as a straight knockout, luck-of-the-draw scenario?

If nothing else, it would give quite a few clearly tired players at smaller clubs a rest in case of an early exit which, considering the most recent concussion and dementia findings in ex-players, has to be a good thing.

Loose Pass compiled by Lawrence Nolan

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