This week we will mostly be concerning ourselves with the European formbooks, and the artificial pitch debate…
Tryfests hold little sway in Europe
And the truth will set us free… for all the talk of how good a product the Prem has become, how the tries are mounting up, how the thrills and spills are making us all gasp, Europe has had its say. And it does not bode well for England.
As my colleague James While pointed out in the aftermath of an excellent weekend of European rugby, the record for English clubs in Europe the weekend past was an ugly Played 8, Won 1, Drawn 1, Lost 6 – with defeats suffered in two of the home games, while thanks to the new bonus point system which now nods to those who defend big leads as well as those who just score tries, only Exeter managed to notch a bonus point on the road, the sole bonus point among the Prem clubs.
More damning are the relative try statistics, with Prem teams leaking two tries per game more than their URC counterparts and one more per game than the Top 14 teams. Granted, the stats for the URC are slightly flawed by the fact that none of their teams travelled to South Africa, the type of fixture that remains a significant flaw in the way the competition is designed when you look at competitive integrity, but that does not explain it all for the English teams.
It’s been muttered about during the free-scoring opening to the Prem, but there is a clear culture of attack winning the games coursing through the Prem at times, with the old ‘defence wins championships’ not yet on the radar. Perhaps, with relegation no longer a thing, that is the prevailing trend for Directors of Rugby: start into the season all guns blazing and then tighten up later in the season when the opportunities for glory become apparent. And being as it is still possible, even with the new bonus point system for winning by three tries’ difference or more, to qualify for Europe’s Round of 16, you can probably get away with that, to a lesser extent, in Europe too.
Add to that the fact, stated in Loose Pass last week, that within the Prem alone, defence levels have not become worse; rather attack levels have improved (admittedly an assumption made on some fairly basic metrics), while game-time and officiating edicts have undoubtedly had an effect.
But Steve Borthwick might be having kittens nonetheless. It would help if one of England’s flagship teams was playing the kind of patient, accuracy-driven, ruthless rugby that Borthwick has for so long espoused and striven for, but England’s clubs seem to be going for shootouts. Saracens, Exeter and Leicester used to be the epitomes of belligerence for English rugby over the past couple of decades; all three shipped 40 points at the weekend. It’s no small irony that the closest a team came to shutting down the opposition as well as beating it was the hitherto free-running Northampton Saints.
We’ve all long pointed to European form as a barometer for the respective national teams and the assumption has often been wrong. One isolated weekend in October – what a rubbish piece of slapdash scheduling by the way – is unlikely to be an accurate predictor of things to come in November. But with England’s defensive stats also making for unpleasant reading through 2026, the Prem’s European adventure feels a bit like forewarning.
For better or for worse?
Louis Rees-Zammit’s Insta post lamenting the state of his skinned legs will have struck a chord with numerous players and, most pertinently, their long-suffering partners who, after many a game, will have been busy washing bedsheets once the players had unstuck themselves from said sheets on a Sunday morning. And on Monday. And on Tuesday.
Artificial surfaces have sprung up all over the European rugby landscape over the past few years. Where in 2011 there was just grass and mud, there are now nine artificial surfaces among the 36 elite European clubs from the top 14, Prem and URC. Add in that the ProD2 has nine out of its 16 teams hosting on plastic, with another three using a hybrid solution, while the Champ has three, the trend is unmistakable.
Opinion is divided. Hybrid solutions have become far more robust and artificial surfaces far stronger over the years. Attention has been paid to details to minimise the injury risks that were once far too high. There can be little doubt that wet weekend rugby in ankle-deep mud has become a rarity rather than a norm.
The effects are obvious on teams like Glasgow, for example, whose coach Franco Smith was last year unequivocal on the positives of artificial turf in Scotland, going as far as to say: “You can’t play rugby in Scotland, in my opinion, if it’s not on artificial grass.” The standard of attacking rugby in the ProD2 has improved spectacularly, with a number of coaches insisting that it helped the teams keep pace with what has been a tactical shift towards more open and attacking rugby generally over the past decade in France.
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Yet both Jake White, famously with Johan Goosen in 2022, and more recently Pat Lam of Bristol, refused to put certain players on the surfaces, citing the likely negative effects of the harder surfaces on the respective players’ joints – especially those recently recovered from injury. And while the rugby has overall become faster and cleaner, purists will argue that it has become rather more generic. The balls bounce more predictably and stay drier. Contact points become cleaner. Scrums are more efficient, but it is easier for a superior pack to put a killer shove on.
Opinion remains divided in PR towers too. Like those games which finished 11-9 after 80 minutes of a defensive dogfight, we miss a good mudbath. Perhaps once the pitches sog up a bit, the Prem defences will tighten up a bit too?