Loose Pass: A time and a place for rotation, London Irish deadline and the business end is here

Lawrence Nolan
Loose Pass

This week we will mostly be concerning ourselves with rotation, finance and a plethora of subplots…

There’s a time and a place

It’s perhaps a tad rich to bang on about this one, after all, it is not as though Loose Pass has not ranted often enough about how players are over-played and exploited by a piecemeal calendar. Rotation and rest are paramount in the modern game.

But there is a time and a place. For Leinster to send what was by no means a first team into the United Rugby Championship semi-final was immensely devaluing to the competition.

There is a pecking order to competitions. Europe is clearly the pinnacle – although many a French team is less clear about this. Leinster definitely have a score to settle next weekend and being as the bulk of the Irish squad is also Leinster’s first team, they’ve had a long season. The rests allotted to some front-liners for the games against the Sharks and the Bulls were fair enough: meaningless games after a home semi-final was all wrapped up. But the semi-final itself?

Coach Leo Cullen cited focus on individual games behind his thinking, a plausible line, but it cannot have failed to put a dampener on things for the Leinster faithful. Outside that faithful it simply smacks of arrogance. You’d not find another mainstream competition where teams would rest front-line players for a semi-final – and a derby semi-final of immeasurable local significance at that.

Does it give their players a competitive advantage in freshness for the coming weekend? It evens things up; La Rochelle’s side that faced Montpellier last weekend was also largely second-string. But then the European champions are in the same situation Leinster were: guaranteed a home semi-final and with little to play for.

So there’s that too. But frankly, if the best teams cannot manage their squads well enough – and Leinster’s squad is deep indeed – to ensure that business matches are played at as full-strength as possible, there is either something deeply flawed in the fixture list or in the attitude to the competition. Either way, it was not a good look.

The next to fall

If you read the headlines enough, we’re in a global banking crisis, with fear and contagion affecting banks even with relatively healthy balance sheets and reserves. Analyses everywhere are poring over the numbers and wondering ‘who’s next?’

Rugby is nowhere near as systemically relevant. Yet you’d be forgiven for asking the same question in England and Wales, and for making similar analyses.

London Irish is the latest to be dangling over the precipice and watching the strands of the security rope unwind. The club has two weeks as Loose Pass goes to press to present its securities for next season, or it’s banished a la Wasps and Worcester. The four regions of Wales are supposedly safe for now, but for how long?

And yet the salary caps continue to rise – in 2024 in the Premiership it will be by 30 per cent. Granted, clubs lose a competitive advantage with French clubs if it doesn’t, but you cannot justify spending money that isn’t there just to be competitive in a league where all the value of winning, more or less, ends up with one team.

Few Premiership clubs are run on responsible business lines – that much has been clear for a long time, even before 13 became 11 in the most unpleasant of circumstances. The same applies to Wales, with the current economic pinch simply an accident waiting to happen.

11 may become 10. It may not. It may well happen later even if it does not now. And in Wales, four will surely one day become three. The masterly inactivity on show is not the correct response – not least with what will potentially the highest-profile World Cup ever looming, which could give rugby’s current dirty laundry a pronounced airing.

Subplots everywhere!

It’s set to be a belter of a finals season! Leinster with a score to settle against La Rochelle in the Champions Cup. The Stormers get a high-profile chance of revenge against those pesky Munstermen who spoiled the Capetonians’ long-standing home record a month or so ago. Sale have an opportunity to plonk the flag for the north of England firmly on the map again. May 26/27 sees the top six in Super Rugby Pacific all playing each other in a tight jostle for home quarter-final privileges, with the Brumbies aiming to spoil New Zealand’s party.

We can worry about the finances and global challenges all we like, but the action over the next fortnight will not disappoint.

READ MORE: URC Team of the Week: Magnificent Munster feature prominently along with magical Manie Libbok

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