Saracens emerge from ignominy to reclaim their place at the summit

T he rehabilitation is complete. Saracens, for so long the champion club of England, even for a good while of Europe, reclaim their familiar crown. Expelled from the Premiership in disgrace three years ago, found guilty of breaches of the salary cap, they returned to the final in their first season back, but the last step to triumph proved one too far on that occasion. Here they rode multiple disruptions to take it in some style.

Whether Saracens are a byword for all that is unholy or convenient scapegoats for a salary- cap process that had failed on multiple occasions in the preceding 20 years or so will depend on one’s allegiance and/or opinion of the state of English rugby, an enterprise that certainly seems to be creaking at the seams. Whether within the cap or not, salaries in recent times have patently been too high, as the scourge of Covid and its fallout has been mercilessly exposing.

You have to assume Saracens are now unequivocally keeping their cap on. So it is poignant to see little appreciably different from when it is alleged they were not. The English crown may not be quite the prize it was, if events in Dublin last weekend are anything to go by. The French and the Irish are taking the game away at the moment. Even Saracens had no answer to the power of La Rochelle in the quarter-finals.

But in the English game they maintain clear distance between themselves and the rest. Sale came in search of their first title since they ascended the heights in 2006, with a star-studded team whose likely wage bill raised a few eyebrows at the time. Now coached by a man dyed in the colours of both teams here, Alex Sanderson, they have this season put distance between themselves and whichever other of England’s elite