The rugby season doesn’t ever end these days.
The Lions are in training and we’re bombarded with adverts about the summer tour. Scotland are in Blairgowrie and the Highlands this week for a little missionary work before jetting off to South Africa for the Quadrangular Tournament.
The player movements will begin and someone’s going to be named Scotland head coach in the next few weeks, either Vern Cotter or someone else, who will be so much of a second choice that he might even be a success.
But even if you’re so much in need of a rugby fix that Super 12 fixture between the Force and the Highlanders gets you out of bed on Saturday mornings – and it did for me at the weekend – it’s good to use this time as a staging post to look back on 2012-13Team of the yearIt should have been Clermont-Auvergne; their stunning rout of European champions Leinster at the Aviva in the Heineken Cup was perhaps the season’s greatest single performance. But they once again failed the final audition.
This team lost eight times in a row until they beat France in Paris on the second weekend of the Six Nations, but never looked like losing again. Without their head coach, their first-choice playmaker and their anointed captain for most of the way. But for a duff first-half against Ireland, Wales would have won a second successive Grand Slam.Game of the yearNothing this year to match 2011-12’s all-timer, the 48-47 Edinburgh v Racing Metro Heineken Cup match. There was Clermont at Aviva, there was Glasgow’s astonishing 60-point haul at the Dragons. There was England’s romp over the unbeatable New Zealand after they’d lost to the Wallabies.
But for me, it was two Autumn matches, Samoa simply thrashing Wales in Cardiff and then Tonga beating Scotland in Aberdeen two hugely significant victories for the emerging Island nations.Player of the yearhttps://www.youtube.com/embed/kFAWjFVsGLc?rel=0
This guy. He galvanised his club in mid-season and his tries against England and Ulster were contenders for the next category as wellTry of the yearhttps://www.youtube.com/embed/AY85DJYSz08?rel=0
Maybe this three off-loads, one of them by a tight-head.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=0UWfEwTCOhw%3Frel%3D0
Or this (check the clock) the reason why this guy may be in Scotland’s midfield soon.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=7mjbJRMEvO0%3Frel%3D0
Or less parochially, this:watch Chris Ashton’s attempt at a tackle and realise why the hyped England wing isn’t on the Lions’ tour.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=-eNokIEJjI4%3Frel%3D0
But even though there was a big element of luck about it, here’s the only try that got me out of my seat in the press box actually, for the first time in yearsFrustration of the yearThe scrummage. The IRB finally bowed to the inevitable and their new “protocol” largely does away with “the hit”, which had simply become a focal point for skullduggery. Odd that the groundswell for change only started after England got dominated in the scrums against Wales rather than Scotland the week before, but it’s never too late to put things right.And looking ahead…Next season? For Scotland, I don’t hold with the current vein of optimism grown out of a modest Six Nations season, and the new man has a tough job to keep Scotland competitive.
It also may be the last year of the Heineken Cup as we know it if English clubs’ brinksmanship reaches its natural end, which would be sad but perhaps inevitable.