The rehabilitation is complete. Saracens, for so long the champion club of England, even for a good while of Europe, reclaim their familiar crown. Expelled from the Premiership in disgrace three years ago, found guilty of breaches of the salary cap, Saracens returned to the final in their first season back, but the last step to triumph proved one too far on that occasion. Here they rode multiple disruptions to take it in some style.
Whether Saracens are a byword for all that is unholy or convenient scapegoats for a salary cap process that had failed on multiple occasions in the preceding 20 years or so will depend on one’s allegiance and/or opinion of the state of English rugby, an enterprise that certainly seems to be creaking at the seams. Whether within the cap or not, salaries in recent times have patently been too high, as the scourge of Covid and its fallout has been mercilessly exposing.
You have to assume Saracens are now unequivocally keeping their cap on. So it is poignant to see little appreciably different from when it is alleged they were not. The English crown may not be quite the prize it was, if events in Dublin last weekend are anything to go by. The French and the Irish clubs are taking the game away at the moment. Even Saracens had no answer to the power of La Rochelle in the Champions Cup quarter-finals.
But in the English game Saracens maintain clear distance between themselves and the rest. Sale came in search of their first title since they ascended the heights in 2006, with a star-studded team whose likely wage bill raised a few eyebrows at the time. Now coached by a man dyed in the colours of both teams here, Alex Sanderson, they have this season put distance between themselves and whichever other of England’s elite clubs remain standing, George Ford’s artistry lending them an extra dimension towards the end of the regular season.
This has been an ill season for England at international level too, a new nadir reached since they ascended the top of the world rankings on the way to a World Cup final only a handful of years ago. How they have fallen from the heights of their semi-final in 2019, the youngest World Cup finalists of the professional era, is a troubling conundrum.
A plausible case could be argued that it all went wrong for Eddie Jones, dismissed in this season from hell after a few boos at this very stadium, when he did away with the services of Ford, whose playmaking axis with Owen Farrell was at the heart of some of England’s most vibrant performances during Jones’s tenure. But here it was Ford’s old mate who rose to the occasion.
Saracens were already facing questions with the lack of a Vunipola in their ranks, Mako pulling out on the day to join Billy on the sidelines. Within 10 minutes, another England international came to sit alongside them. Jamie George suffered a hideous blow to the top of his head when he ducked into a Tom Curry tackle.
The disconcerting mood reached a pitch at the end of the first quarter. Sean Maitland this time was stricken on the floor, another senior international about to limp off, when explosions of orange dust enveloped the continuing action. In that surreal split-second to work out what is going on, it became apparent that two protesters had invaded the pitch in the name of Just Stop Oil.
No one likes a pitch invader and the crowd duly booed as the officials took a strangely long time to eject these two, who were later arrested. Almost as if, like millions of others around the world, they felt as if the invaders might have had a point.
But there is no substitute for experience in such situations – and Saracens retained the edge, despite their losses. Still shaking the orange dust from their hair, they opened the scoring when that other consummate playmaker Alex Goode set up a penalty try with a chip down the blindside that yielded a spell in the sin-bin for Curry, who tackled Max Malins without the ball.
Even if it is not quite at the level it was pre-pandemic, the Premiership remains a fabulously vibrant proposition on the field. Finals are often edgy affairs, but rarely in this competition. This iteration developed through those unnerving moments in the first half into another exhilarating contest, Sale waxing strong to take a lead midway through the second half. If the league still craves the eyeballs it needs to ward off that niggling sense of imminent apocalypse, the players themselves could not be doing more.
These feel apocalyptic times indeed – for far more than just English rugby, as the scattering of infernal dust was designed to remind us. Such times call for leadership and imagination. In English rugby’s little world, Saracens remain incomparable in those departments; Farrell, Goode and all the other cool heads reigning supreme, with or without their caps on.
