Frank Keating: 'Burnout proceeds with a cold calculation in rugby'
Tense and relishable anticipation will continue to simmer through the week at the prospect of rugby union's Heineken Cup final between Leicester and Munster on Saturday. In each of the seven years since its glorious incarnation, the knockout tournament has immeasurably refreshed and invigorated the European club game through its fledgling professional turmoils. Its conclusion, invariably stirring and theatrical, makes for a pluperfect curtain-call to a season - the more so this year when its purely sporting clamour might even manage to wipe the blushes from the face of the English Premiership after its calamitous and cynical pay-off conspiracy to deny Rotherham's right to promotion.
Domestic rugby folk will be bonkers, however, if they reckon for a moment it means they can get on with a leisurely summer, and that Saturday's supposed grand finale at the overworked Millennium Stadium signals a resonant end-of-term celebration to their already overburdened season.
You want fixture congestion? You want meaningless moneymaking overload? You want to witness in close-up extortionate executive and sponsorship self-serving? You want actually to observe player burnout in cruel and sharply defined technicolour? As midsummer approaches, it is all condensed here in gaudy and breathtaking reality.
Good heavens, big-time pro soccer in Britain might be in a state about the perceived swirl of contradictions about too much or too little in terms of money, fixture congestion and player fatigue. But it cannot hold a candle to rugby union as she is organised and staged in these islands. There were complaints recently over soccer's decision this season to deny the FA Cup final its traditional clean-cut season's end celebration while the Premiership was still to be completed. The FA at once announced that would not happen again. In comparison, when it comes to bringing down the final curtain with a flourish, rugby's treasured Heineken Cup final is squashed painfully into a janglingly incoherent and indiscriminate medley of diversions.
Coinciding with Saturday's cup final - indeed, sandwiching it - is Twickenham's version of the IRB World Series seven-a-side tournament on Friday and Saturday. The following day, Sunday, takes place not only Heineken's junior club event the Parker Pen Shield final, but also - you have to believe it - the World Barbarians XV match against England at Twickenham.
The following weekend is even more barmy: by then it is Cardiff's turn for the World Sevens on the Friday and Saturday, nicely arranged to upstage - or be upstaged by - England's two Zurich Premiership play-off semi-finals slated for Saturday and Sunday. Those four already preposterously overworked sides will be vying for a place in the play-off final at Twickenham the following Saturday - by now, good Lord help us, it is flaming June 8 - to determine the Zurich Championship winners when, as any fule no, Leicester were already as good as champions by Christmas and had proved it before Easter. The alleged "battle" of Premiership relegation, which for weeks this spring the authorities shamelessly (possibly fraudulently) allowed devoted supporters to fret over, travel to and pay exorbitantly for, was cancelled at a stroke, just like that - only after the clubs in question had safely banked their gate money, I bet.
It goes on . . . On the same day as that trumped-up English final - by which time, by the way, the England and Ireland soccer teams will have played their first two World Cup matches - the Wales rugby team will be playing South Africa in Bloemfontein and attempting to avenge the humiliating 96-13 defeat the last time they were there. Thus burnout proceeds with a cold calculation in rugby.
Should the England and Ireland soccer squads be back home with their feet up after elimination in their final group matches on June 11 and 12, they could, for light relief, be tuning in the upcoming weekend to hear England's first match of their Argentina tour, or Wales's second Test in South Africa, Scotland's in Canada, or Ireland's in New Zealand.
Rugby, rugby, everywhere . . . To think, only a dozen years ago, one of the then imperishable laws of the RFU was that no competitive rugby - even a tour to the Isle of Wight by the Old Fartonians Extra B XV - could be played after May 1 without written permission from Twickenham. It was seldom granted. Now the game's bloated and crazy calendar even helps dissipate what should be a sharp tang of eagerness for what has been, anyway, an overlong season's celebration curtain-call this Saturday. It has to be admitted, mind you, that Leicester v Munster has all the makings. Of course, the stage at Cardiff will be overwhelmed by ghosts wafting in from the west - because no one, not even die-hard Leicester folk, can refuse themselves a heartfelt thought for Llanelli, so cruelly beaten by a hit-and-hope double-in-off penalty goal by Leicester's Tim Stimpson deep into injury-time in the semi-final.
It was one more stake through Llanelli's heart - in what is becoming, for them, a harrowing annual spearing by Vlad the Heineken. Remember two years ago, the Scarlets again running down the clock in added-on time in the semi against Northampton when Paul Grayson booted them out of the final with another great welly of a penalty. Then, in 2001, even more piercing the pain in the final stages when, first, they were knocked groggy by the flukiest drop goal in the history of the whole tournament and then saw the French club Pau crawl from the grave to score two tries in injury-time against Pontypridd and so deny Llanelli on aggregate try count. All that, and then up stepped Stimpson this spring.
The cup holders Leicester seemed irresistible till Llanelli sso nearly tipped them out. They will be en garde all right. Munster will doubtless have something Celtic up their sleeves, be it canny, cute or confrontationally kitchen sink. They always do.
One of the most shrewdly bonny bits of coach's nous I remember was a couple of decades ago when good Mick Doyle was the brains behind Munster. The Romanians, then a pretty muscular international force, were in Ireland. Before the tourists' easy opening victory against Leinster, "Doyler" had noticed that, immediately pre-match, nearly all the Romanian team had settled their nerves in turn with extended stints locked in all the various lavatory cubicles in the region of the dressing rooms. Come the following Saturday, and for fully two hours before the kick-off against Munster, Mick organised with military efficiency a rota that had every man of his team take up occupation of every toilet within miles of Limerick's Thomond Park. Thus an extremely fretful and, in some cases, extremely constipated group of Romanians took the field - and Munster's most winsome of victories was never in doubt.
There is one happy exception to the foregoing tirade against Twickenham's very own constipation in continuing rugby's cockeyed congestion of fixtures. The women's World Cup in Barcelona continues all this week towards its grand final on Saturday.
Barcelona? Lovely, sure, but how shameful for the IRB to send the world's best women players to that rugby outpost and not stage it in Britain with the resultant colourful and deserved exposure. But, of course, regularly as they have pleaded, the RFU has refused with even more of the chauvinist condescension of the MCC at Lord's to consider allowing women to play on its hallowed male-only south London preserve. "Perhaps next year, poppets," is all they ever hear. Annually.
Good luck to the 14 teams in Spain this week - can it really be less than 15 years ago that I covered England's inaugural women's international against Wales in Cardiff, on the very morning of which I killed time with them after the pioneering team had first to wash up the breakfast things, clean, dust, fold their sleeping bags, and be out of their Chepstow youth hostel by 10am? - and then mooch around in a public park for four or more hours before kick-off? From Chepstow to Barcelona - as the old Virginia Slims tennis ad had it - you've come a long way, baby.