Five is now six in Europe’s premier rugby championship, and it’s not before time, writes Eddie Butler
It’s all very new millennium, this expansion to Six Nations. But it has to be said: it’s about bloody time. By now we should be up to at least Seven. If Romania had been offered the hand of welcome a dozen years ago then we could have saved rugby in the Latin land of the East and perhaps used it as a springboard for expansion into Georgia and beyond.
It’s been a closed shop for too long, a small luxury store for select customers only. It’s been great fun, of course – all those jaunts when rugby has its place in the paltry sun of February and March. But it has been as unfair as the refusal of New Zealand to do anything for the development of rugby on the Pacific Islands, bar pinching the best talent for themselves.
It is not without irony that after years of checking and double-checking the credentials of Italy, the door of the private club should finally be opened to a team whose hands are so raw from knocking that they can’t catch a ball.
Italy join as the sixth nation and in a sixth-rate condition. They have had a grim year, having been bounced around by South Africa, and pounded by England, the All Blacks and even Tonga in the World Cup. Still, better to have it that way. Which is preferable: to spend the millions the championship generates on development work, or to pour it into the wage black- hole of the old five nations?
Italy are most welcome, and Rome and the Flaminio Stadium will be sparkling additions to the cities and stadiums of the championship. The newcomers will not win the grand slam. Never let it be said that we have become cautious with our predictions.
But who will win? Without wishing to appear tentative, this is a tricky one, the World Cup and European Cup having done much to upset the pecking order and traditional presumptions.
Take England, for example. At about this time every year for the past decade we have placed them joint favourites with France to become champions. But now their coach, Clive Woodward, is supposedly hanging on to his job by a fingernail. His team were stilted in the World Cup and the clubs of the Allied Dunbar PremiershipEhave been as wooden as the national team, besides being chock-a-block with players ineligible for England.
Who might fill the gap? Surely not Scotland again? One year of glory is traditionally followed by a position more in keeping with its limited resources. The Edinburgh Reivers and the Glasgow Caledonians, its professional outfits, have scarcely electrified the planet. Only Scotland of the old family of nations are not represented in the quarter-finals of the Heineken Cup. Both so-called super- districts languish in the lower half of the Welsh-Scottish League. How can even Ian McGeechan mount a successful defence on that?
Ireland have been touted for an uprising recently. Last year such predictions were based on the inspirational fortunes of Ulster in Europe. Ireland, unfortunately, went all Irish and did nearly as badly in the last Five Nations as Ulster have done subsequently this season in Europe. Ireland beat only Wales and Ulster have beaten nobody.
But now Munster are setting a similar example and taking Europe by storm. Keith Wood is leading from the front and there is an O’Gara-Mullins-Keane midfield that is turning more cerebral tricks. In short, there are grounds to suppose that Ireland might have a good campaign.
But tell me that raw fervour nowadays cannot win the day, not at Test level. The Irish province of the hour can scream around Europe and make everyone jump, and in the guise of the national team in green they may startle some opponents at Lansdowne Road, but it won’t wash over the course of the season.
Wales should be ready to make progress. Graham Henry continues to work his magic in the land that has clamped him to a heaving bosom. It’s an embrace that has left him aware of the need to lay off the adrenalin and work on the brain, the bit that the Welsh players tend to leave in the change- room. Even in the land of the deeply seamed, and now disciplined, talent is a problem. Henry took a dejected team and catapulted them into a position from which they could challenge the best. But can they beat the best?
His team have reached a plateau and the insistence with which he pursues talent all around the world suggests that the backyard will never yield the riches necessary to take Wales on to the next tier of improvement.
Which leaves France. At which point we say what we always say: anything could happen. Except that they have a new coach in Bernard Laporte, a new captain in Fabien Pelous. So much that is new in a team that does not like to be shaken.
However, the French clubs play the most advanced rugby in Europe. Laporte might give them the discipline that galvanises the power and imagination that the players possess.
And yet they remain fragile, as close to near-defeat against Fiji at home in the World Cup as they are to the glories of the semi-final at Twickenham against New Zealand. Which way will they swing in what might be an anticlimactic championship?
I’m afraid there is worse to come. Rugby in the Six Nations is going to be transformed by the law changes introduced on the eve of competition by the International Rugby Board.
There will be more fluidity as scrums wheel freely without being reset. The back row will be reinforced as the most influential position on the field, unless they find themselves buried as they take the driving maul from the line-out to ground. And the front row will be pressed into greater service also, forced to scrummage for longer and then immediately called upon to run on the peel at the line- out, as permitted by the new changes.
So, who responds quickest to progress? Answer: Scotland. Who will be the first to find the loophole and nullify the good intentions of the law-changes? England, unless Clive Woodward can finally convince them that the game is to be played from start to finish with a positive intent. It’s asking a lot of a coach on his last assignment.
So, here we go: the bottom line. England will struggle in the Six Nations and be the surprise flops of the new millennium. Scotland will be surprisingly solid and will retain their title. Italy will win one game. France will alternate between brilliance and horror, and finish three-two up. Ireland will alternate the other way and finish three-two down. And Wales will be runners-up. At one stage, Wales will be reduced to six players on the field, such is the pull of the sin bin.
Of course, I shall be wrong. You are invited to sneer at your pleasure. That is why the Championship of Europe, whether with four, five or six nations taking part, is unfathomably special.