WASPS v SALE: MATCH PREVIEW

 What happened to rugby's sense of mystery? Watching Sky's wall-of-sound coverage of the Heineken Cup last week, it struck me that the teams in this competition are becoming so familiar with each other, and the viewer, that the essential clash of cultures that European competition ought to celebrate has been eroded in the last seventeen years to the point that it no longer really exists.   

And it isn't just the Heineken Cup. When the All Blacks pitched up at Twickenham earlier this month, their playing roster was so well known, on the whole, that there was no real magic in their arrival. Saturation coverage of the Super 15 and the rather hubristicly named 'Rugby Championship', not to mention the annual pilgrimage north, has dampened the allure of these visiting teams to such an extent that the occasion only really becomes an event when England unexpectedly summon up the wherewithal to challenge them.

The event ought to be the simple fact that a team from the other side of the world (or, indeed, from the depths of southern France) has arrived. Unfortunately, in rugby terms, the other side of the world is now no more than a remote-control click away. Eden and Ellis Parks are as commonplace on our tv screens as the Rec or Franklin's Gardens. All of this undoubtedly comes across as the grumbling of a sporting luddite, and there are of course many things to celebrate in rugby's modern era, but mystery, unfamiliarity, otherness – these things are casualties of the professional game, and their loss is to be mourned.

Nowhere is the homogenised, globalised, over familiarity of modern rugby more evident than in a team like Toulon. They are the embodiment of rugby's professional melting pot, a multinational in a world once occupied by quaint local businesses. As they completed back-to-back wins over Sale at Stade Felix Mayol last weekend, the only thing that was remotely exotic about the encounter was the name of the stadium. Strange to say, but there was more familiarity in the Toulon team sheet than the Sale one, and the Sale one was hardly packed with strangers. Nearly half the Toulon squad had played in the Premiership at one time or another; nearly a third of them were English. For seasoned Premiership watchers, there was a piquant reminder of old times when Simon Shaw came off the bench and promptly got himself yellow carded. Plus ca change, as they probably say in High Wycombe.

The sight of Toulon's team-sheet might well have aroused a sense of awe, but there was little curiosity in it, little to tantalise the imagination, no advance whispers about players not yet seen, the latest magician fly-half or grizzled prop raised on raw buffalo meat. We already knew too much about them, and what we knew most of all was that they weren't particularly French. Does it matter? Isn't awe more likely to put bums on seats and money in the coffers than curiosity? Won't the sight of Bakkies Botha, Matt Giteau, Carl Hayman, Andrew Sheridan and Jonny Wilkinson running around in the same colours more than offset the loss of some Gallic mystique? It's about entertainment, after all, and Toulon's all-star cast is built to deliver. Shock and awe. Who needs curiosity?

Well, I do. It would have been nice. Once upon a time (possibly), a team visiting from the cold northern wastes of Yorkshire, Lancashire or Cheshire would have been something of a curiosity in itself. Down they'd come from Liverpool or Sale, Otley or Orrell, swapping steam power for an Intercity 125 somewhere around the Birmingham parallel, before heading further south to whichever team they were due to play. A cup game, possibly. A rare visit, in any case. Their hosts would dazzle and confound them by providing cutlery for the post-match meal and electric lighting overhead. Or, if it was a return visit, the northern team might provide entertainment in the form of impenetrable songs about roaming the countryside without adequate headwear, while plying their visitors with strange brews bearing heads an inch or more high. A culture clash and, save for the odd posh boy sent from Northumberland or rural Yorkshire to be educated at Oxbridge, precious little intermingling of the old DNA. That's how I like to imagine it, anyway.

Fast-forward to this weekend's clash at Adams Park, and the differences couldn't be starker. In keeping with modern rugby's homogeneity, Wasps and Sale have hooks in each other at all levels. Wasps alumni Joe Ward, Andy Powell and, of course, Danny Cipriani, now ply their trade at our opponents. The Bell brothers, Simon McIntyre and Lee Thomas have all moved in the opposite direction. James Wade and Trevor Woodman have Sale connections, and Sale's current head coach, John Mitchell*, was once a coach at Wasps. The same cross-pollination is in evidence right across the Premiership, the inevitable consequence of a professional sport. The only element in the game unsullied by the touch of previous loyalties is us, the fans.

And as Wasps fans, we know exactly what the Sale supporters are going through at the moment. Six points adrift at the bottom of the Premiership, with just one win from their ten games so far, their season has started even more badly than ours did last year. For a team that qualified for the Heineken Cup this season, and seemed to have recruited pretty well, the fall from grace has been chastening. The constant chop and change in the coaching set up can't have helped. The chuntering about misfiring fly-halves, a refrain common to High Wycome, Melbourne and now Greater Manchester, has a sense of inevitability about it. Sale's brave new world at a fresh new stadium has spluttered and stuttered, and the longer the malaise continues the more nervous they'll all get, because as we know from the words of our own players in the last two seasons, once the confidence begins to ebb it doesn't take much for heads to fall and yet more matches to slip away.

Empathy is one thing, but if Sunday is to be a test of Sale's fragile confidence, it's also to be a litmus of how far Wasps have moved on from their own annus horribilis. To say that our performances this year have outstripped those of last season is to state the obvious. In patches we have been excellent, but in patches we have also assumed the headless chicken mode characteristic of the worst of last year. Dai Young's mystical eighty minute performance has yet to materialise. Last weekend's match was typical, a very good, controlled first half followed by the second half dip that has afflicted us for most of the season. Andrea Masi's well-taken but opportunistic try shouldn't obscure the reality: after half-time we seem to have trouble restarting the engine.

Sale will come down hoping that we don't get it started at all. Their season is already boiling down to the simplest of equations: start winning, or get relegated. They will be targeting this game. They might sense that our own confidence is fragile beneath the apparently rejuvenated surface. If they can land a few punches early, goaded by the twin stares of Mitchell and Diamond, perhaps we can be forced into the aimless kicking or the panicky offloading that pressure sometimes elicits. We can no longer dazzle them with electricity or sophistication or our worldly ways. They're just as worldly as us now. They have half the BBC, and a nodding acquaintance with Mediterranean cuisine.

La dolce vita, as they undoubtedly call it in Salford.

*Correct at the time of writing