Elvis told me when I was down the chippy.

It’s the silly season as far as the supporters’ websites are concerned.  The Aviva Premiership is barely half over, and we haven’t got to the Heineken Cup quarter finals, but already fans are fretting about the shape and size of next season’s squads.  The comings and goings rumour mill is already in full swing, and there’s barely a club that’s unaffected.

Let’s start with the obvious: there’s a salary cap in place and from what we hear, it’s even going to be policed to some extent.  Now, whether that’s driven by a sudden desire for fair play across the Premiership, or by financial expediency, who knows?  My hunch is that it’s the latter.  So, that should make for something approaching a level playing field, shouldn’t it?  Not in the fans’ minds as far as I can see.

Bath, despite languishing in the bottom half of the table, are on a financial high: new owners, new training facilities, and, if you listen to their fans – driven it must be said by some enthusiastic coverage in their local paper – after anything that moves that has ever worn an international shirt!  In recent months their supporters have linked Bath with Messrs. Attwood, Hook, Charlie Hodgson, Croft, Haskell, Golding, Luke McCallister, Berrick Barnes, Geraghty, Cussiter, Doran-Jones and Louw, some of whom have, of course, already signed elsewhere!  That would have been some squad that was being assembled down there; however, it was the stuff of Fantasy Rugby!  If it had been even half true the Premiership salary cap policeman would have been winging his way down the M4!

The Bath fans are no worse than any others in this, and a look at most other clubs’ fans’ sites will reveal lots of ‘I heard from a mate down the pub, who knows a bloke who goes in his local chippie whose sister is married to someone who works with xxxxxx’s brother…’ and so it goes on!

And then, of course, there are the agents.  Their job is to look after their players’ interests, and if we pluck young kids straight from school and put them into the Academies, then they’re going to need someone to do their negotiating for them.   Agents are much reviled by fans but all they’re doing is the best they can by their players.  Even the most tentative of discussions with another club is sure to leak out, and that further drives the rumour mill.

It’s the nature of professional sport that players come, and then they go – one-club men are getting fewer and fewer, and the days of clubs being dominated by local boys are long gone.   However, it’s hard to escape the feeling that the merry-go-round is going to be spinning faster than ever over the next few months.   Financial pressures aside – and rather than increasing the salary cap, a bigger question is which clubs are able to spend up to the current limit – the Rugby World Cup complicates matters.  The final is on 23 October, and shortly after that expect the flights into Heathrow to contain more than a smattering of Saffers, Kiwis and Wallabies.  Some will be heading to France but purse strings are tightening there, to the extent that fans over here are picking over the bones of some of the clubs in the lower reaches of the Top 14.  More than one website has the entire Bourgoin squad listed with the question ‘Anyone we fancy?’ being posed.  We live in interesting times!

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Crisis at Sky Sports.  I fully expected a black screen and martial music to be playing around tea time last Sunday, after Munster crashed out of the Heineken Cup.  It’s part of the British psyche to react against something, someone or some team being ‘hyped’ beyond belief: for a while we take it, and then it starts to grate.  Such has been the depth of the Sky love-in with the men in red that I have found myself longing for them to get stuffed, just so I can see the Sky guys squirm, and I know that I’m not the only one who has felt that way.

The Barnes/Harrison combo is the best comment and commentary team around in rugby – so good that it simply makes all of the others look worse than they actually are – but Munster has long been their blind spot.  They have been so over-the-top in their admiration and praise that one has to wonder whether their genealogy efforts have uncovered some long-lost Limerick relative. 

The Republic has a population of less than 5M, compared to England’s 50M, and it might be reasonable to suppose that the proportion of Sky subscribers in each country is broadly similar, but it seems as though the Irish province gets a disproportionate amount of Heineken Cup coverage. 

I’m pretty well Munstered out for a while, and I’m not sorry to see the back of them in this year’s competition, although the danger signs were there late on Sunday afternoon: you mark my words, Leinster is the new Munster as far as Sky is concerned!

First published in The Rugby Paper on 23 January 2011 and reproduced with the editor's permission