Peter Jackson: Out for the count, Europe’s big three

There have been six multiple winners of what is now known as the Champions’ Cup and two have gone already, counted out with indecent haste.
No contender for European rugby’s super-heavyweight title can have been reduced to a horizontal state of distress quite as rapidly as Leinster. Their elimination after three rounds outside the ring evokes memories of the fastest stoppage inside it more than 30 years ago when Mike Tyson put Michael Spinks away in 67 seconds.
Ulster‘s achievement in making similarly short work of Toulouse in Belfast ensures that Leinster are at least in good company. The old French emperors, the only club to have conquered Europe four times, are up the same anonymous creek without an oar between them.
A third of the Super Six, Munster, are in the process of taking a very long count. Back-to-back defeats by Leicester leave the perennial challengers in such a fix that spiriting them into the last eight looks a call for the Salvation Army not the Red one drawn from Limerick, Cork, London and all points in between.
That their next stop takes them to Paris on January 9 for the rearranged tie against Stade Francais suggests that Munster will be knocked out then unless head coach Anthony Foley can work a miracle between now and then.
Should Leinster, Toulouse and Munster be looking for a little cold comfort in the mildest December for more than 60 years, then they will find it in the strange event of Toulon joining them on the outside looking in. The accompanying floods of schadenfreude should that come to pass will be enough to put Noah’s Ark-building business into mass production.
The damage done by the severity of their beating by Wasps in Coventry last month leaves the triple champions precious little room for further error from their three remaining matches, home and away to Bath with Wasps heading to the Stade Felix Mayol in between.
If they avoid any further scrapes and reach the knock-out stages, Toulon, for once, will have to do so away from their citadel on the shores of the Mediterranean.  Saracens, Leicester, Racing and Wasps have already gone a long way towards securing the priceless prize of a home advantage.
All will be revealed in the New Year.  The more relevant question revolves round not how the mighty have fallen but why? Toulouse, historically the mightiest French club of all, have been falling for some time.
They won the last of their record 19 French titles four seasons ago, the last of their record four European titles in Paris six seasons ago. For Toulouse, a semi-final is the minimum requirement and yet they have failed to make the quarters in three of their last four attempts.
And yet their place at the head of another table has been taken for granted on a perennial basis.   When it comes to the Top 14 ranking based on each club’s annual budget, the ‘Rouge et Noir’ always seem to be in the black, never in the red.
Their budget for last season of €35.02m was an all-time high but still not enough to get them out of the pool competition.  It’s almost as if the more they spend, the more they fail.
Figures released last month by the Top 14’s organisers, the Ligue Nationale de Rugby, showed Toulouse had trimmed the budget down to a mere €30.87m – still more than the rest, still not enough to get them into the business end of the tournament.   While budgets are put in the public domain, wage bills are not.
The figures can be misleading. As a convenient excuse to highlight the imbalance, British clubs are not slow to hold up the towering figures and create the impression that French budgets are five or six times more than British salary caps.
The number-crunchers running the Top 14 calculate that, in the case of the four clubs with the largest budget – Toulouse, Clermont, Stade Francais, Toulon – about one third goes on players’ wages.  At £8-£9m that still puts them ahead of the Aviva Premiership where the figure this season is up £1m to £6.5m.
Salary cap abuses in England have been a hot potato recently over Premier Rugby Ltd’s investigation into breaches and subsequent failure to name and shame.  In France, one club have openly admitted to paying players in a way which circumvents the salary cap.
Toulon claim they have done so legally in a way which has allowed part of players’ salaries to be paid through commercial arrangements outside the cap.
New regulations stipulating that clubs can pay bonuses worth up to only 40 per cent of a player’s salary are to be enforced in late April. Mourad Boudjellal, Toulon’s president who has rocked enough boats in recent years to sink the Establishment armada, will have a fair idea by then whether he has bought a fourth European Cup or whether money can’t buy everything.
Poor old Toulouse, over-exposed to Ulster’s high-octane game on successive weekends, have found out the hard way that, in their case, it can’t even buy them a place in the last eight.