The top four placings in the Premiership are meant to be decided on a gripping final Saturday afternoon. This year they may have been settled when the team sheets were submitted on Friday lunchtime.
Northampton, with a home semi-final already bagged, are entitled to shuffle their resources but the selection of a weakened Saints team to face Leicester has done little to boost the scheduled last day drama.
By resting Courtney Lawes, Tom Wood, Calum Clark, Samu Manoa, Stephen Myler, Luther Burrell and the Pisi brothers, the Saints’ director of rugby, Jim Mallinder, will not endear himself to supporters of Exeter Chiefs, whose prospects of qualification for the play-offs will be directly affected by the Welford Road outcome. Unless the likes of James Craig and Teimana Harrison can upset a strong-looking Tigers pack, Exeter will have to rely on a hapless London Welsh wrong-footing Saracens in Oxford.
The counter-argument is that the Premiership table is a product of eight months’ effort, not only 80 minutes’ worth. The Tigers have rarely endured a tougher slog than this season, their 45-0 hammering at Bath in September was among the most painful in the club’s history, they have not always had the best of injury luck and now, on the eve of this final weekend, Manu Tuilagi’s assault conviction has done further damage to their public image. Small wonder their players are approaching the game like parched desert nomads who have glimpsed a soothing oasis.
Title success may still prove a mirage but, of the three teams jostling for the final two play-off places, there is no doubt Leicester are the most grateful. “If you consider how we played in the early part of the season, to be third in the table speaks volumes for the guys who’ve been involved week-in week-out,” said Ed Slater, their captain.
Which invites the burning question: how much do the Tigers have in this year’s tank after all their trials and tribulations? They may have scored 39 fewer tries than Saturday’s opponents Northampton but their defensive record is the league’s equal-best and late-season motivation is not an issue. Slater, only just back from a serious knee injury which had sidelined him since August, remembers the sense of creeping horror he felt eight months ago in Bath, where he was working as a pundit for BT Sport. “Martin Bayfield had moved a few seats away from me by the end. I just couldn’t get my head around what I was seeing. The players were shellshocked. It was a really difficult loss to take.”
Almost as bad has been the subsequent sniping from ex-Tigers unimpressed by the modern generation and the imminent departures of Geoff Parling, Jamie Gibson and Julian Salvi. “It pisses me off a little bit,” Slater continued. “I read the stuff Neil Back put in the paper, taking digs at the club. It’s quite easy to pick holes from the outside. But when you’re losing a lot of players to internationals and injury, it’s hard to deal with. We know what we’re trying to do, regardless of what people say.”
Slater thinks the old stagers do not fully appreciate how tight the league is becoming. Disagreements behind the scenes have clearly occurred but Ben Youngs offers the starkest analysis. “Even in European games we haven’t had our normal physical edge,” England’s scrum-half said, citing the long-term absence of Tuilagi through injury this season as the key factor. “When he plays he’s everything to us. Take him out of the team and you can see people looking around wondering how are we going to deal with his absence.”
Even without Tuilagi, who remains injured and could face disciplinary action from his club after his conviction, last week’s much-improved performance at Wasps may have reignited the Tigers’ former spark. The 40-year-old Brad Thorn, finally heading towards retirement, makes comparisons with the Brisbane Broncos rugby league side he once represented: “In 2005-06 we lost five or six games during the year and still won the title. Everyone said we were old – and that was when I was 31! It’s not always about what happens in the first quarter of the season. If you can get into that top four it’s all on.”
When it comes to “big-time footy”, as Thorn refers to it, Exeter remain relative rookies, never having finished in the top four before. The mathematics may be problematic but the Devonians can hardly be dismissed as lucky should they make it. “Do we deserve to be in the top four?” asks Rob Baxter, their head coach. “I was talking about it with my wife this week. If you look at the Premiership table we’re on the same number of points as Saracens and one behind Leicester with one game left. The scoreboard doesn’t lie. We deserve to be there.”
It is not only the firm conviction of the club’s soon-to-depart Australian captain Dean Mumm – “the hardest thing about semi-finals is making it there” – that the Chiefs, missing Dave Ewerson Saturday, would pose real problems in the last four. Maybe that is another reason for Northampton’s team selection, having lost twice to the Chiefs this season. A third meeting at a sold-out Franklin’s Gardens will unfold only if Exeter can surpass what Saracens achieve against a London Welsh side who have leaked 137 tries in 21 games.
Either way, there is every chance of Leicester heading back to Bath in the semi-finals, with Youngs among those up for a rematch. “We’re massive dark horses for the title race but if I was at another club I wouldn’t want to play us in a semi-final or a final. Last week it mattered and you could see it in the players’ eyes. We don’t want to be the first Leicester team in 11 years not to make the top four. We’re in a good place in terms of freshness compared with, say, Saracens.”
Listening to Thorn’s throaty growl, too, you would not bet against Leicester. “We’re here to try and win the comp. Does it mean we’re cocky or arrogant? No. But we have a belief in each other. If we put it out on the field we can challenge as strongly as anyone for the title.”
There is nothing blurred about the Tigers’ vision as they head towards their play-off oasis.
