A TV Mix-up in Devon

On Saturday, I had a light lunch and then sat down to watch a weekend of five games of rugby.  Until this weekend I had not seen any club rugby, I suppose I don’t manage to get too excited about the Prem Cup, for months.  Friday brought a very watchable first Prem game, with a lively game between well-matched Bears and Tigers.  It suggested that both may well offer quality to take them deep into the competition for top-four slots come next May. Saturday was to be even better.  The champions of England are taking the well-trodden road down to the West Country.  Regardless that Exeter had finished, most uncharacteristically in the lower half of the table last season, they can, and always do, raise their game against a side that for many reasons they regard as their most disliked rivals. 

Then something went wrong.  Instead of a hard-fought contest to get both sides’ seasons underway, I found that by mistake our new-identity TV providers had mistakenly filmed earlier footage of a Chiefs’ unopposed training run.  A group of local players with junior clubs had been rounded up, dressed up in Saracens away kit, been made up to resemble the Saracens squad and sent out to provide token opposition.  It was impressive to watch.  The Chiefs revelled in everything, the warm weather, the perfect playing conditions and this last pre-season preparation for the real games to come.  Passes all went to hand, kicks all landed as they were supposed to, defence clicked superbly and on average, to add to the feel-good of the afternoon, on average every four minutes of actual playing time, one of any number of chiefs players crossed the line for a try.  A good crowd had turned out, of course.  Exeter Chiefs’ supporters would turn up to watch their heroes open an envelope if it came from North London.  At one moment, I was even day-dreaming that I saw Jabba the Hutt, thoroughly enjoying a day in the posh seats.  Perhaps it was an Exeter director dressing up to add to the gaiety of the day. 

Enough of this flânerie; life is grim, life is earnest.  Sadly, I cannot bring myself to write up the game in detail, and it may be hard to find any other write-up, given other rugby distractions.  The reality is that only two good things come out of this game. 

The first consolation is that Saracens can probably never again play as downright badly as they did on Saturday afternoon.  The game plumbed depths even deeper than the worst two performances that I can recall.  The first was a Christmas Premiership game at Vicarage Road against Harlequins.  It was bitterly cold, not one player form either club was interested in being there, the crowd was chilled to the bone in that concrete tomb, and hot food ran out.  A miserable draw was the result, but the day was a short moment of my life that I saw as one of the most wasted afternoons, never to be regained.   The second, equally awful, was when Clermont came to Vicarage Road on an icy evening and schooled Saracens in what is needed to be taken seriously in Europe.  Now in my very late 70s, I do hope never to experience a third in person.

The second consolation is that with the papers full of the Rugby World Cup, this debacle seems to have received remarkably little coverage.  Apart from the ineradicable result, perhaps we can persuade ourselves that it never happened, and the supporters who travelled can eventually get over the shock.