2 weeks Ago By Evan Bartlett
Henry Slade launched into his season’s debut for Exeter with a line kick, and resistance to heavy contact as he helped lay on a Ross Vintcent try, and a conversion – all in the first quarter. But while the 65-cap centre proved his fitness for England , and was en route to re-join the squad on Sunday evening, he could not stop Chiefs sinking to their sixth league defeat out of six , at home to Harlequins , and Exeter have only Newcastle Falcons below them in the table. The Premiership now goes into the international break with a literal pause for breath.
As Leicester Tigers ’ Australian head coach Michael Cheika put it, after Saturday’s chaotic 32-29 win at Saracens : “I’m usually the coach whose team is running the ball the most. “But over here, everyone’s throwing the ball around like crazy – I feel like I’m being left out sometimes because we’ve gone..
.not traditional, but we’re doing things differently compared to some of the others.” With this greater range of styles in the Premiership comes unpredictability.
Among the Premiership’s top four teams in the opening six rounds, Bath have won at Leicester, Leicester have won at Saracens, Saracens have won at Bristol , and Bristol have won at Bath. Over the weekend, Bristol had a contender for try of the season, finished by Joe Batley, in beating Northampton , while Sale Sharks lost 40-13 at Bath and Newcastle’s revival lasted one match, as they were a distant second best at Gloucester . Leicester’s injury headache Read Next Three problems stopping Exeter Chiefs from turning around worst-ever start There was a time when a club coach like Cheika was likely to spit his dummy out at news of a top player being injured training with England, but the pact between club and country, underpinned by the Rugby Football Union’s £264m professional game partnership (PGP) with the Premiership, appeared to hold as Cheika reacted to reports of Leicester forward Ollie Chessum being out for a few weeks with a knee injury sustained with England.
“It’s disappointing but guys have got to train, they’ve got to prepare for the [international] season,” said Cheika, who will now step back to allow Matt Smith and Neil Fowkes to coach Leicester in the forthcoming Premiership Cup, which includes 10 of the Championship clubs. New contracts Chessum was on Friday named among 17 leading England players signing the much talked about “enhanced” elite payer squad (EPS) contracts. They are different to cricket’s central contracts, inasmuch as Jamie George, Ellis Genge, Maro Itoje, Immanuel Feyi-Waboso, Marcus Smith and the other 12 still have contracts with their main employers, the clubs.
But there is a fear among club supporters that it is the thin end of a wedge of England dictating when and where the players play. Others see it as guaranteeing the players an international fee of a reported £160,000 a year to provide security, and in some cases a power play by the players to ward off offers from clubs in France or Japan. The length of each contract of one, two or three years is secret, as it is considered commercially sensitive.
They were negotiated by a recently-formed body, Team England Rugby (TER), separate to the Rugby Players’ Association. This new group, headed by George, Genge, Itoje, Joe Marler and Anthony Watson, say their aims are “collective but direct influence over the issues that affect them the most – playing, rest and recovery time, pay and commercial considerations, and how their profiles can be best enhanced to help the growth of the wider game”. They are aware some may see it suspiciously as being paid more for playing less.
There again, many observers have long bemoaned that the players are bashed up from too many matches. One notable element in the small print of the TER deal is “an exemption process” to allow a player to tour with the Lions next summer even if he is on or near the PGP’s maximum number of 30 matches a season. Saracens miss Farrell Owen Farrell is one who shot off to France this season, and on the weekend the former Saracens fly-half scored his first try for Racing, his old club did some old-school thumbing through the contacts book to fill his place in the loss to Leicester.
Read Next Life after Owen Farrell: What Saracens fans can expect Much-travelled Tim Swiel is heading for Miami in America’s MLR, but having helped Saracens out in a friendly against Leinster last season, he stopped by again last week, due to Sarries missing four No 10s: Alex Lozowski on England duty and injured recent signings Fergus Burke (hamstring) and Louie Johnson (bicep), followed by Alex Goode (quad) pulling out just before kick-off. Swiel – who has played for Harlequins, Newcastle, Edinburgh and clubs in South Africa and Japan – did not know all the moves, but he still contributed a try and nine kicking points. As for Leicester, who are now second in the Premiership, Izaia Perese was named man of the match and he has come full circle with Cheika who was in charge of Australia when he brought the then 18-year-old centre on a UK and Ireland tour in 2016.
No rest for Scots Scotland will open their autumn series against Fiji at Murrayfield next Saturday, straight after England vs New Zealand, but whereas all bar Slade among the England squad had their feet up over the weekend, the Scots were in URC action. Edinburgh lost 22-13 away to Ospreys, while Glasgow won away to Stormers 28-17, with the past and present national captains Rory Darge and Sione Tuipulotu, and highly-prized prop Zander Fagerson, among those involved. The Scotland head coach Gregor Townsend has grumbled about having just two training sessions before facing Fiji.
At the same time the players should be battle-hardened. Twickenham’s new name It’s time to take your line on the renaming of Twickenham as Allianz Stadium. A £100m-plus deal for the next 10 years means the insurance company’s name will be in the faces of the 82,000 spectators for next week’s England-New Zealand match, plastered everywhere from the sides of the stands to the turnstiles to paper cups.
Sports fans tend to pigeon-hole these deals into two main categories: the stadiums that establish the identity from day one, such as The Emirates at Arsenal and The Aviva in Dublin; and those that change and hope for the best: BT Murrayfield, now under the name Scottish Gas, or the Kia Oval, or the virtually unutterable “cinch stadium at Franklin’s Gardens”. Read Next The Welsh rugby club that wants to merge with England's Premiership Some say the sponsor should be name-checked as a thank-you for putting money into rugby. Others say it is selling the soul.
The rugby media are not united as yet. One major news outlet is sticking with “Twickenham” while another is trying “Allianz Stadium, Twickenham” – on the basis that otherwise no one will know what they are referring to. A third has waggishly used “the stadium formerly known as”.
i understands broadcast rights-holders BBC Radio are not obliged by contract to use the new name, and are likely instead to compromise with a mix of references across their air-time. Some England players have been raising their eyebrows when they self-consciously correct themselves to say “the Allianz Stadium” instead of “Twickenham”. The hotel attached to the ground has a nine-word name, would you believe.
This writer favours using Twickenham for the time being, for the sake of clarity, and to see how the new name goes. Ever since the ground opened in 1907, the T-word has stood for more than a venue for a match; to rugby folk at home and abroad, it represents English rugby, the RFU, and a place for players to aspire to get to. Maybe people will soon be saying comfortably “see you at the Allianz” or the “AllStad” (but not, please, the Ally Pally – that’s taken).
In the meantime, don’t worry about the sponsors: they have done their analysis and know what they are getting into. Where is the best ground in rugby? On the subject of stadiums, Ospreys’ return move to St Helen’s next season had chief executive Lance Bradley wondering in these pages recently whether it is the most picturesque ground in top-level rugby. A couple of other candidates looked good over the weekend: The Rec in Bath in the autumn sun and Stormers vs Glasgow at the Danie Craven Stadium in Stellenbosch, in the South African spring sun: backdrops of honey-coloured Georgian architecture and the Twin Peaks mountains, respectively.
Tastes vary, and maybe some would prefer the city-centre vibe of Cardiff, Leicester or Gloucester? All nominations welcome..
