Never mind that Gloucester had lost, the music blaring out in the players’ area after the match included Pink Floyd’s Money with its lines “Think I’ll buy me a football team” and “Don’t give me that do-goody-good bullshit.” Money can’t buy you love.
Saracens are braced for more of the same on their travels this season, the pariahs of the Premiership after a panel set up to hear allegations of salary-cap breaches over the previous three seasons ruled against the English and European champions, deducted 35 Premiership points from them and added a £5m fine with legal costs to be decided.
Saracens’ rise a decade ago was based on a singular approach in which they generated strength from within, not caring about the perception outside, rugby’s version of Millwall. Dislike descended into something deeper last week with the salary-cap breaches, which have not been specified despite the punishment handed out, cited as proof that the club’s titles since the 2015 World Cup were down to breaking rules that the others observed, cheating as blatantly as using blood capsules to simulate an injury and facilitate a replacement, faking front-row injuries to go to uncontested scrums or ensuring victory in a European Cup final by knocking the ball out of a scrum-half’s hands as he was about to feed the set piece.
The game is going through one of its unseemly morality outbreaks and Saracens took to the field at Kingsholm with fake £50 notes being waved at them and chants of always cheating. Two of England’s World Cup squad, Jack Singleton and Ben Spencer, who between them enjoyed 17 minutes on the pitch in Japan, were among the replacements but Owen Farrell, the Vunipola brothers, Maro Itoje, Jamie George, George Kruis and Elliot Daly had been given the week off.
It was the fourth round of the Premiership and Saracens were again some way below full strength, as they will be for five weekends during the Six Nations, more than 40 per cent of the regular season, plus whatever rest periods the elite player agreement between Premiership Rugby and Twickenham stipulates. A victory earned in typical fashion, digging in, muting the crowd and keeping their heads while their opponents were trying to locate theirs, took them to minus-22 points, although the deduction was suspended after the club indicated it would appeal.
Saracens’ England contingent look like being given the next two weeks off with the club’s director of rugby, Mark McCall, saying that he would be giving the Premiership priority with the threat of relegation real if an appeal is lost and the points’ deduction stands. Given the solidarity at the club, it is unlikely that many players would look to leave even if the Championship beckoned but, as he pointed out, there is a Lions tour in 2021 and he does not want them to be in a position where they may have to sacrifice their place in that squad.
“We are not thinking of breaking up the squad,” he said. “The World Cup players were in twice this week even though they are off, an internal sign of unity. They wanted to play against Gloucester but we were never going to do that. If we were relegated, we would need to do some thinking and proper planning with a Lions tour at the end of next season. Our job, if the appeal is unsuccessful, is to stay up. We have to plan for a worst-case scenario which will affect our strategy around the Champions Cup.”
It was probably just as well they stayed away from the tournament’s launch last week because confessing it was likely to be a refuge for reserves would not quite have been what the organisers wanted to hear. “We would have had some conversations anyway because it is unrealistic to think some can come back from five months away and play in a Champions Cup game two weeks after a World Cup final,” said McCall. “I think a number of the players involved today deserve to experience European rugby and it could be a big benefit to us in the long term. A siege mentality is not sustainable over seven or eight months. Being fuelled by anger or frustration is too negative. It will all be about how we can support each other.”
And, as fate would have it, their next league match, at the end of the month when their England contingent will be fit and firing, is at Bath, not a club that has been advocating the champions be treated leniently.