Loose Pass: English underachievers, penalty drama and the state of rugby post-pandemic

“I’m not going to let people build the manifestation of Leinster being the European giants that they are. They have got to come to our backyard. It’s our gaff,” said Ellis Genge this week in typically bullish fashion. A fair shout for a Tigers player to say, but the bigger landscape is different now and gaffs are more irrelevant.

Leinster went to Leicester’s gaff. They did lay at least a couple of impressions of being the European giants that most say they are; certainly Leicester looked like plucky minnows at times. And with Racing finding an extra gear pretty much everybody knew they had to see off Sale after a tawdry first half, here endeth the Champions Cup – for English teams anyway. Leicester talked an excellent game and they’ve played some excellent rugby this season, but at Welford Road it was men against teenagers.

It should not be lost upon everybody that three of this season’s semi-finalists are French, the same French club foundation that created a team eminently capable of winning the next World Cup (in France) and the same French club foundation that is currently scrapping for bragging rights in a league so tight that you’d be able to place sensible wagers on any of its top seven teams becoming champions (and a decent long shot bet on the current eighth place team, Toulon). The other semi-finalist could have passed for a full Irish Test side, Kiwi imports and all.

Nor should it be lost upon anyone that Leinster’s and Racing’s starting line-ups between them had more than 25 full internationals; Leicester’s and Sale’s only just over half. Racing had five full internationals on the bench. While Leicester’s players had been hammering away against Harlequins in a Premiership bellwether and then ensuring a