It's curious to contemplate the Premiership without Harlequins, certainly for any French followers of rugby, because the team in the multicoloured shirts have been synonymous with the English game since we began to get to know the old enemy a little better in the mid-1990s thanks to the European Cup.

Back then in France we knew Bath and Harlequins, and the fact that Leicester played in shirts with letters instead of numbers. Laurent Cabannes and Thierry Lacroix played for Quins in the early days of professionalism, and I've always liked visiting the Stoop, so it's been a bit of a surprise to me in recent weeks to see how many people seemed to want them to be relegated.

I've never felt any arrogance there, among the players or the fans; I've just had the feeling that they are a bit different, in the same way that Racing Club used to be. They are the London club, but they seem to have good structures below the professional side, and the new stand shows a willingness to invest. It's a shame to see them going down, but I think they will bounce straight back.

Ironically, we at Saracens were on the receiving end of probably their best performance this season, when they put 50 points past us rather too straightforwardly. They've been criticised for putting bricks and mortar ahead of players when it came to investment but they didn't feel understrength that day - you can't say that about a side with Andre Vos, Will Greenwood, George Harder and Ugo Monye in their ranks.

We are going to see this sort of drama every season now, I suspect. Bristol will come up in September and will want to impress everyone, as Worcester did. After the Rotherham experience, teams are going to make sure they are well armed and streetwise when they join the elite. And I'd expect Harlequins to come straight back to the Premiership after one season.

You can't help feeling that the punishment is a bit extreme, given the tightness of the margins involved. In my heart I believe relegation has to happen because, if it doesn't, who cares about the bottom of the table? The fear and the emotion are immense, it's a huge draw for the spectators and media, but the sanction is severe.

Still, if Quins fans think they are hard done by, perhaps they should look over the Channel, where two clubs will be relegated from the French championship and such major sides as Grenoble and Béziers are under threat. It's exactly the same scenario: the powers that be want a smaller elite but someone has to pay the price. There has to be an argument for widening the Premiership to 14 but the calendar at present simply won't sustain it.

The weekend's results underline one other thing: from the moment the season starts you have to keep on your toes and make sure that you go for every bonus point as if it is made of gold. One bonus point would have kept Harlequins in the Premiership - and their relative lack of them indicates that they had a lot of close results. And one bonus point would have put us into the Heineken Cup, if only we had scored two more tries at Gloucester on Saturday, or scraped one somewhere else during the season.

Instead, we have the first round of the play-off for a place in Europe on Friday against Worcester, and everything we have done in the past few weeks is up for grabs again. I'm not convinced about the format of the play-offs to get into Europe. To start with, it feels curious to be playing a team who have finished 15 points behind us, for the same goal. Worcester could have been relegated; now they have a chance of a Heineken Cup place.

It may feel strange having to get ourselves up to play again after having the impression that the season had finished on Saturday, but we have to conjure up the same spirit that earned us victory against Leicester. Not that Worcester can be under-estimated, because they have given us hard games both times we have met this season.

But that simply underlines that the bottom of the Premiership has been highly competitive, as Harlequins have discovered to their great cost.