Our return game against Toulouse is played the same weekend that France play England, depriving Toulouse of their six French international players. There is a good deal of wailing and gnashing of teeth on the part of coach Guy Novès that the game is being played at all, but it has already been delayed once because of a clash with the Six Nations program, and there is simply no more room in the calendar unless we play on a weekday.
It is worth pointing out that Toulouse are missing merely their current internationals: in fact there are still twelve players in the starting line-up with international experience: nine for France, and one each for New Zealand, Ireland and Argentina. Not too shabby, then. At the same time, Toulouse have suffered over the past couple of months from what seems to be fatigue, with most of their squad on call for international duty of one sort or another, as well as the European Cup and French Championship. They have lost a couple of games they would have normally expected to win, particularly a shock home defeat against lowly Bayonne. So we think there may be the sniff of a chance.
The French king Henri IV was, apparently, rebuked by his confessor for his sexual liaisons outside his marriage to the queen. His response was to order that the priest should be given nothing to eat but partridge. 'Toujours perdrix'— 'Partridge again'—was the lament of the man of god when confronted with the same rich feast night after night. I have eaten enough chicken and pasta to know what he was talking about: professional rugby has you playing so many games throughout a season and over the course of a career that playing top-class sport in front of a crowd of thousands becomes a humdrum affair.
However, the match against Toulouse is my first game back after four months out with the ripped tendon in my arm, and even though I am only on the bench I revel in the whole thing as though coming to it for the first time: the training session the night before in atrocious conditions, where we don't drop a ball through the 45 minutes; the comfortable intimacy of sharing a room with a team-mate; the slow build of adrenalin as we get closer to kick-off; the precision of the line-out drills in a nearby park the morning of the game; the uncanny silence of the bus ride to the stadium with everyone in their own thoughts; the feel of the ball in your hands and the smell of the grass underfoot during the warm-up; the first sharp thuds of contact with flesh and bone as the intensity of preparation increases; the rapid sentences, full of expletives, that are spoken earnestly by the group's leaders in the changing-room as the minutes tick away. In between, players' backs are slapped, bums tapped and encouragements murmured, small gestures of affection that would probably be inappropriate anywhere else but which I find strangely moving. Several guys tell me how pleased they are to see me back.
As always, we gather in a tight circle with our arms over each other's shoulders and look each other in the eye as a few final words are said, the referee's whistle blows and we file out, steel sprigs clicking on the concrete floor, towards the tunnel, and the noise and colour of the arena. As I take my seat on the reserve bench, 'Carmina Burana' is at full throttle on the loudspeaker system and the drums of the Toulouse fans are thudding a slow martial beat. I love every minute of it and the game hasn't even started yet. It makes me realise how much I have missed it, and how much I will miss it when I stop.
Believing you can beat Toulouse in Toulouse is a triumph of optimism over experience, particularly for a 'little' team like ours. The problem is that if you don't believe, if you go there simply out of obligation and think more along the lines of damage limitation, you will get slaughtered. They can put 50 points on you without even playing particularly well. I remember going to Toulouse with Perpignan the year we made it to the final of the European Cup. They put 40-odd points on us and we didn't even feel we had played badly. Last year the tally was 60 points, all done without even making it hurt. Unlike other teams that beat you up before sending the ball wide, so you have physical bruises to go with your psychological ones, they were able to score several tries from first phase without having a finger laid on the ballcarrier. The irony was that we scored four tries ourselves, largely through driving mauls from line-outs, and so came away with a bonus point for attack and considered it a good day at the office.
For most of the first half the two teams seem evenly matched. Toulouse break through a couple of times, but don't seem able to finish as easily as usual, and you can feel that their confidence is brittle. After half an hour they do score, but at the break they are only 5–0 up and we feel anything could happen. Perhaps they will finally cut loose, or perhaps the slight edge that we have in the scrums and line-outs will pay off.
In the ten minutes after half-time they kick a penalty and score an unconverted try, but we don't let go of the game as we have on other occasions. With 30 minutes to go I come on, and am so excited to finally be back playing that twice I go rushing up in defence with an over-eager, big swinging arm and bounce off tackles.
Eventually, I settle down and start enjoying the game. Our defensive line is swarming over them, and Rickus Lubbe, our South African centre, is having a great game containing Jauzion. I latch on to their number eight as he goes to ground, and get my hands on the ball, but am turned side on as their forwards arrive. My leg is jammed under him at an awkward angle and I get hammered as they try to clear me out. For a moment I think my knee has given way: a bolt of lightning shoots through my leg and the joint bends in a way nature never intended. But as I gingerly get up it seems to be still working and we get the penalty. Over the last 20 minutes we really turn up the heat, until a couple of uncharacteristically bad throw-ins in their half from Olivier Diomandé, who has come on as replacement hooker, put paid to any chance of a win. Still, in the last minute we finally scramble over the line from a tap penalty and need only the conversion to secure a bonus point. But Coco swings it wide, and we have to settle for 13–5.
Afterwards in the changing-room we are almost euphoric, and at the after-match function various Toulouse fans ask us to sign flags and jerseys and programmes, which, if scant reward for the evening's efforts, is a mark of respect and a welcome dose of flattery. I run into Slade McFarland, who has recently arrived as a replacement for the injured William Servat, and was on the bench for Toulouse. The last time I saw him was in 1991, when we were kids playing for the New Zealand Under 19s. He is talking to a sponsor, a man from EADS, the giant multinational behind Airbus, and one of several financial heavyweights that pour money into the rugby club that has the biggest budget in the world. (Ordinarily one or two English clubs may have been able to lay claim to this title, but the salary cap in place in the English championship, even though widely acknowledged as a farce, makes it impossible to get any idea of real figures.)
By this stage of the season there is a yawning gap between the big teams and the little teams. The clubs qualified for Europe, all with budgets over €7.5 million, have between 50 and 62 points and are jostling for position for the semifinals and next year's Heineken Cup qualifications. The minnows like us have only half as much. Along with Narbonne, we are on 25 points, just ahead of Pau on 21 in the red zone of 13th place, while Bayonne, largely thanks to their surprise win over Toulouse, have breathing space on 31. Toulon, the backmarker, are already coming to terms with the fact they will be back down to the second division next year: they have only 12 points. Between the two poles are Brive and Agen on 37 and 43 respectively.
The direct correlation between money and success is hard to miss, although luckily there are one or two anomalies that keep it interesting: Narbonne, who have the smallest budget, 5.8 million, and don't look to have much future in the élite of French rugby in the long term, keep pulling it off against the odds, while Montferrand, at second place on the money table with more than €10 million, are the serial underperformers of the competition.
'Professional sport' is in one sense an oxymoron. A fundamental principle of any sporting contest is that it take place on a level playing-field, but when one side has two, or even three, times as much money as the other the odds are heavily weighted in their favour. The worst of it is that the circle is as virtuous for the 'haves' as it is vicious for the 'have-nots': the more money you have, the more likely you are to be successful, and your success will attract more money still. This can jeopardise interest in the competition: if the outcome of a game is predictable, why bother watching?
The hope of watching David sneak a victory against Goliath still has people coming to watch obvious mismatches, and the home-and-away thing adds a bit of spice in France, but the gap between big and little teams is growing into a gulf, and there is only limited interest in watching Goliath smashing David to a pulp again and again. Since I have been playing in France the first division has shrunk from 24 teams to 14 in an effort to ensure a quality spectacle for the punters, without whom there would be no sponsors, no money and no competition. But the best games are the relatively rare occasions where Goliath is up against Goliath (or, occasionally, David against David).
Rugby is particularly vulnerable to accusations of predictability in terms of results: the rules of the game have been engineered to produce numerous scoring opportunities, and thus high scores, so the better team have more scope to make sure the scoreboard reflects their superiority. The Rugby World Cup is a typical example. It may be difficult to predict the eventual winner, but you know it will be one of a small handful of top teams. In fact, you can fairly accurately predict the semifinalists simply by looking at the draw; with one or two exceptions, pool games are rarely as interesting as their equivalents in the FIFA World Cup.
This is problematic for the future of the sport, and there have been various suggestions as to how to fix it, at least at club level. The salary cap is one option, but the English example seems to show this is not worth the effort. The smaller clubs stick to it simply because they don't have any more money, while the big boys easily circumvent the problem by providing 'jobs' for their players with major sponsors, much the same as during the bad old days of shamateurism. In essence, Joe Blow signs a contract with his club for £50,000, and this is his salary as a club professional. The club is concerned that Joe might want a little more to be going on with, particularly since another club has offered him £60,000, so they have a word with their sponsor, Acme Cleaning Products, who find Joe a particularly well-remunerated position doing next to nothing for £30,000 a year. So Joe is on £80,000, but only £50,000 shows up on the club's books, allowing it to comply with the salary cap.
The same kind of system is already in place in France, where it is referred to as 'image rights': the sponsor may use your photo for marketing purposes, or you may have to attend a corporate bunfight to add a little sporting glamour to the otherwise dull proceedings. This has a double benefit to the club: it avoids the heavy taxes for employees, and ensures the money is not considered part of the masse salariale, which is not allowed to be more than 55 percent of a club's overall budget.
This means published figures for club's budgets are not entirely trustworthy. Biarritz, for example, reckon they have a budget of €8.5 million, just €2 million more than Montpellier. I guess it is possible to assemble the sort of all-star team that, like the Real Madrid of Beckham, Zidane and Ronaldo, is nicknamed The Galactics, on just €8.5 million and a love of the Basque country and its climate, but I have my doubts.
Another option is the draft principle along the lines of American football or basketball, where the bottom-placed clubs get first choice at the new talent. This is probably unworkable for several reasons. Players are not yet paid enough that you can oblige them to move from one part of France to another, and clubs would be discouraged from bringing up players through their centres de formation, training academies, if they run the risk of losing them at the end. (Currently clubs have to pay a fee to the feeder club if they sign a player out of a centre de formation.) And it is notoriously difficult to make the right choices about young players who are yet to be exposed to top-level competition.
One of the things that puzzles me about the people who have been indirectly paying me for the last nine years is why. Why do they do it? What is in it for the sponsors? In the unlikely event that I were ever to become rich enough to be sitting on the sort of money necessary to invest in professional sport, I could think of plenty of other things I would want to spend it on before distributing largesse to a bunch of hairy-arsed schoolboys running around in shorts. Still, there's no getting around the fact that more and more people are pouring money into the game, and they can't all be idiots.
In the spirit of investigative journalism I go along to one of the sponsors' monthly lunch parties in Montpellier, and find there are a number of different reasons, depending on the size of the business and the money it can put into the club. At the lower end of the scale are businesses that simply buy season tickets, which allow them to come to games and have access to after-match receptions. Montpellier suffers from having a stadium well past its use-by date so there are no corporate boxes, but the club has cunningly decided to spend a lot of money on excellent food and drink. If sponsors come for the rugby, they stay on late for the foie gras and other delicacies served by the Brasserie du Corum, washed down by unlimited quantities of wine and beer in a party atmosphere. Often the businesses are relatively small and the owners simply enjoy going to the rugby and having a knees-up afterwards, and they can take along a client or whomever they feel like and slip the season tickets into the communications budget, thereby making the whole thing tax-deductible.
Bigger outfits are happy enough with the rugby and the party, but they also come for the schmoozing. Rugby's egalitarian atmosphere means potential clients can be met in an informal setting and useful alliances made while discussing whether Montpellier should have kicked for goal, or taken the scrum, or the referee who has it in for us, or indeed anything from the vast panoply of rubbish that people talk about after a game. 'Jobs for the boys' is a common theme in business all around the world, but perhaps even more so in France, where cultivating le piston—the contact—is an art form. Here in Montpellier, the Agglomeration is the major sponsor, and they are also responsible for spending a massive envelope of taxpayers' money on roadworks and building projects, so rubbing shoulders with the people from the Agglomeration can be well worth your while if you can provide anything they might want to buy.
The really big sponsors—the ones who put hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of euros into the clubs every season—have a variety of reasons for spending on rugby. For les mécènes, the corporate philanthropists, it seems to be a hobby that doubles as a useful marketing ploy. Serge Kampf bankrolls Biarritz and the French Barbarians. Pierre Fabre at Castres, Max Guazzini at Stade Français and the Michelin family at Montferrand are all multimillionaires in their own right, and can afford to dabble in a sport that has high media exposure without being as expensive as football. They probably consider the emotional return on their monetary investment justification in itself. This is not to say they are simply rich dilettantes—I suspect you don't get to the top of the pile by splurging on a whim—but they are not particularly concerned to get a concrete return on their investment.
This is not the case for Orange, the France Telecom Group, which sponsors a number of rugby teams, as well as football teams, and must justify their spending. Working out how much the space on the front of a jersey is worth must be a hell of a job, and quantifying the returns on sponsors' money far from simple. There are people who are paid to note the amount of screen-time a particular sponsor's logo gets. How much attention viewers pay to a logo, consciously or unconsciously, while watching a game must be almost impossible to gauge, and what it is worth compared to an equivalent amount spent on conventional advertising is anybody's guess.
Then there are the collectivités—the towns or regions who spend taxpayers' money on professional sports teams because they consider sport a drawcard and see the team as standardbearers for the town. In Montpellier the prime mover behind the massive taxpayer funding of the rugby club is the former mayor and current head of the Agglomeration and the Languedoc-Roussillon region, Georges Frêche. Something of a benevolent dictator, Frêche has said that the rugby he played as a young man taught him important values, and he wants to encourage the youth of Montpellier to learn the same thing. He clearly feels that the best way of promoting the game in the region is by implanting Montpellier in the élite of French rugby. Not only has the Agglomeration been paying the lion's share of the club's budget, it has also stumped up most of the €60 million for the construction of the new stadium. While this has obviously been of massive benefit to the club, allowing it to make giant strides over the last five years, having most of your money dependent on political goodwill is a precarious state of affairs. Frêche is coming to the end of his tenure, and there is no guarantee his successor will be as enamoured of the oval-ball game.
The danger of finding a black hole in the middle of your budget is very real in French rugby. Over the nine years I have been playing in the country, four clubs have been relegated for financial reasons, and every year there is talk of money trouble dogging one or more of the élite clubs. Toulon, Grenoble, Colomiers and Bègles-Bordeaux have all paid the price for miscalculating what was coming in and what was going out. When this happens it leaves the club in ruins. Players depart en masse, and new management comes in to pick up the pieces. The road back is not an easy one. This year, Toulon made it up to the first division after five years in the second division, only to discover that this time round they were too cautious with their money, and by not investing in the necessary talent they didn't have the fire-power to compete at the top level.
There is every chance that this will continue to be a common theme in the coming years. As the gulf between first and second divisions becomes unbridgeable, there will be a yo-yo system of clubs coming up, getting hammered for a year à la Toulon, then going straight back down. Lyon look like being the one club that might be able to put together the kind of long-term project necessary to survive in the top flight, largely because they are a major city and benefit from the kind of heavyweight financial backing that is unavailable to smaller clubs—unless a moneybags turns up and decides to throw money at it until the required results arrive. And even then, money on its own is no guarantee of success: it needs to be intelligently spent, which is not always as straightforward as it sounds.