He always does this, Lawrence Dallaglio. Whenever he and his Wasps team are preparing for another almighty tilt at the biggest prize in European club rugby - and we are all salivating at the thought of it - he lobs in his reservations about the whole thing.

He has done it in the past, and last week - with his team this time the reigning champions, no less, and preparing for today's collision with Biarritz, semi-finalists last season and the employers of 19 full internationals - he did it again. And so, just as the rest of us were billing the Heineken Cup as the most perfect distillation of all that is great about sport, Dallaglio ruins it all by exposing the ongoing problems.

'There is a discrepancy with qualification in that there will be a lot of teams who will start this season's Heineken Cup in the knowledge they are already in next year's,' he said at Wasps' training ground, with the shimmering trophy by his side. 'The whole qualification process really needs looking at.'

So what exactly does he mean? When challenged, he holds up his hands and says that he is not trying to start an argument.Derek McGrath, the chief executive of European Rugby Cup Ltd (ERC), the organisers of the Heineken Cup, also sidestepped the issue, mumbling something about the importance of the competition's integrity. You sense that they are disgruntled about something, but they do not want to spoil the party just as it is getting under way.

Dallaglio went as far as to point out that the 12 English Premiership clubs spend nine months beating the life out of each other to be among the privileged few (he called it four or five - actually, this season it is seven) that make it to the Heineken Cup. And all that in addition to beating the life out of Europe's finest to try to win the trophy itself.

In the meantime, the Irish teams can concentrate all their energies on the Heineken Cup and breeze their way through their Celtic League programme, knowing that they will be in Europe the next season, come what may.

It is a valid point, but it is far from easy to do doing anything about. An obvious implication is that there should be more of the brutally competitive English and French teams admitted at the expense of the weaker Celtic or Italian teams, but that would be a travesty. To turn the event into an Anglo-French competition with a few others tacked on would destroy its colour and hinder the development of rugby in the smaller nations.

The key is the Celtic League and more specifically the Irish attitude to it. The simmering frustration that everyone is so reluctant to voice is the stand of the Irish Rugby Football Union (IRFU).

ERC ALLOT EACH country a number of participants in the Heineken Cup, but it is up to the country to decide who those participants should be. The IRFU are the only governing body not to have set down performance criteria for qualification, which basically means that Munster, Leinster and Ulster always play in the Heineken Cup and Connacht play in the secondary European competition.

In one stroke, this strips the Celtic League of its credibility (because the Irish provinces do not have to take it seriously), it robs the Heineken Cup of some of its integrity as an elite competition and it seriously annoys the likes of Dallaglio, who are having to crack skulls to qualify every year.

The Welsh are seething, too, because they are trying to take the Celtic League seriously and it does not help if the Irish start to do the same only as the Heineken Cup approaches. The Welsh would like to see the top eight teams in the Celtic League qualify, regardless of which country they are from. This, though, might mean that a country has no representatives, which would be unacceptable. A compromise could therefore be that the highest-placed team from each Celtic country qualifies, followed by the five next best, wherever they are from.

Whichever way it is done, the Irish need to engage more with the Celtic League. What Dallaglio seems to be trying to say is that he would like to see as much blood shed there as there has been and will be this weekend in the Heineken Cup.