For any neutral or natural-born cynic, the pleasure in the extended unravelling of the English domestic rugby season takes some beating. Winners of the two top divisions have already been settled, of course, and all the delight for those of a mischievous disposition has come from the desperate squirming of oligarchic Twickenham mandarins as they confront the distinct possibility of relegation from the Zurich Premiership of one of its presumptive founding top dogs - Saracens, Harlequins or Bath.
Piquancy is flavoured by the knowledge of how yawningly mundane the Premiership would have been since Christmas without this rousingly bitter relegation dogfight. The sponsors and the rest of the dog-in-the-manger monocrats who want to ring-fence their elite confraternity should be grateful for the continuing interest in their product. Trouble is, they realise identical relegation calamities could be theirs next year.
Predictable even last September, Leicester strolled to the Premiership title nine days ago, a week after Rotherham's celebratory 12-try demolition of Manchester had secured the League One championship and, with it, automatic promotion to the Premiership. So the rules demanded. But the Twickenham body, England Rugby, had already put a dampener on such assumptions, demanding that the unfashionable and unmoneyed little Yorkshire club, who play on the edge of a socially deprived inner-city housing estate, meet strict criteria relating to ground size, facilities and financial competence.
Local MPs charged the class-war barricades with banner-waving vim and a sheaf of appalled statements flew to Twickenham from Westminster citing the "closed-shop elitism" by the toffs of Twickers - charges, of course, given extra impetus by the continuing slide into serious relegation trouble by the traditionally crack Premiership aristocrats and founders. "We need to portray the right image," said Howard Thomas of Premier Rugby, "we can't have clubs playing professional rugby on a park field."
Rotherham easily solved the main problem of their dinky Clifton Lane ground by organising a share for next season with the local football club at Millmoor, but Twickenham's "independent panel" is still considering its audit of Rotherham's books and is due to announce its decision by the end of the month. By which time it it is even possible that the Premiership might have had the gall to cancel any further relegation worries for their blue-chip crowd-pullers and simply announce that next season's Premiership members will be increased by one.
Bath and Harlequins are the monarchs facing assassination, of course; none of the powerbrokers cares over much about untrendy Saracens nor, certainly, the fourth club scrabbling around the relegation tub, Leeds, even though they have a much higher profile (and bigger bank balance) than Rotherham and operate with a comparatively swish presence in a rugby league heartland where union is keen on providing exposure with some sort of style for sponsors and television cameras.
It is almost seven years now since English club rugby sold its soul to professionalism. Businessmen bought in. Some are realising suddenly that there was a price to pay. In more than a century affably steeped in aspic behind the clubhouse door, amateur rugby's timeless freemasonry and old boys' network had defended the ethos, polished their blazer badges, sung smutty songs, sunk their pints and guarded against predatory upstarts with bulging wallets and business "brains". No longer. Business is now the name of the game. And business is business.
Competitive leagues with promotion and relegation were allowed only 14 years ago. This is the first year that two of the game's most blue-blooded dandies have been under serious threat of a calamitous drop. If Leicester, with their good husbandry and cautious far-sightedness, have managed to be the relentlessly dominant club in recent seasons, their record in the professional era still cannot match Bath's in the last years of the old shamateur one, when Regency's old Recreation ground was showered with trophies and titles.
In the very first year of professionalism, Bath RFC changed its name with a haughty grandeur to the "marketing brand" Bath Rugby plc and gaily allowed BBC cameras in for a fly-on-the-wall documentary series. It focused with cruel relish on the club's presumptions. Bath had won 16 trophies before that camera began turning over in 1996. They have won just a solitary one since, the Heineken Cup in 1998. I remember wincing when that diverting film, with deadly aim, had their coach John Hall bragging: "We're going to be both the Manchester United and the Liverpool of English rugby."
Oh dear, only half a dozen years later - and about the same number of sacked or disaffected coaches - and Bath Rugby plc is up to its knees in a relegation mire. In last week's match programme the club's millionaire owner, the greetings card manufacturer Andrew Brownsword, pleading almost hilariously to supporters that he only became involved for spiritually philanthropic reasons "as a conscientious citizen" because the club was "not a profitable personal business investment, there are no tax-deductible benefits, no ego trip. . .just a genuine service commitment to the community".
Brownsword's team of accountants will have told him that relegation will bring some atoning community service trips to Wakefield or Otley next season - rather like those medieval monarchs who used to traipse barefoot to Walsingham to illustrate reverent social commitment to their subjects. Someone will also have mentioned to Brownsword how wretchedly difficult it has been to get back into the Premiership once out of it. In Bath's purple passage as undisputed league champions of England between 1989 and 1996, they probably never noticed that Waterloo, Liverpool St Helens, Moseley, Nottingham, Rosslyn Park and West Hartlepool were relegated, cast into the dark wilderness, never to get remotely near the top drawer again. Alas, where are they now?
Should it not be Bath, but Harlequins, who are for the executioner's drop, even more mirth will resound in a nation that generally knows not, nor cares a fig about, the difference between a ruck, a maul or a ruckus. No need for blathering bandwagoning Labour MPs to tell the public that Quins represent soft-southern toffs and no mistake. Founded in 1866, they are the home club to Twickenham itself. Quins have been good show-pony cup players but have too often been languidly unserious about getting their hands dirty week in week out in the league. They are city slickers, special-day swells. And favoured sons.
Hadn't Quins boasted providing more than 100 England internationals (and 16 captains) before their cannon-fodder neighbours Saracens managed their first (hooker-medic Dr JH Steeds in 1949)? Why, didn't Quins provide eight players to the 1991 World Cup final? Yet a year later they were again flirting with relegation - at which their estimable coach Dick Best (like Bath, Quins have had a succession since) complained: "Everyone, everywhere, hates us. Everyone in rugby and out of it is willing us to go down. It is ludicrous - we are hated just because we are the Harlequins, the perceived peacocks of the game."
Dick was right, and you sense the very same class-conscious vapours swirling around the chortling clubhouses of England (and far beyond) this springtime - a rousing case of hats off to bold nouveaux Rotherham and - C'mon Sarries! C'mon Leeds! - let it be those two strutting swankpots, boastful Bath or forever queening-it Quins, who are left to dispute the frantic, final fight to the death. In which case, some say, a horrified Twickenham would step in, stop the contest, and simply cancel relegation this year. And I still wouldn't put that past them.
Champions of the wing reach their miraculous milestones
To mark Sir Tom Finney's 80th birthday this month Milo Books have updated and reissued as a paperback Paul Agnew's charmingly smitten 1989 biography Football Legend. As is the custom, Sir Tom picks his all-time England team since he began himself in 1945 - Swift; Howe, Wilson; Wright, Franklin, Moore; Matthews, Keegan, Lawton, Mannion and on the left wing, should Preston's knight not be prevailed upon to captain his own team, John Barnes, "whom I loved to see in full flow, riding tackles and breezing past defenders".
Of other moderns, Sir Tom's softest spot is for Ryan Giggs's "exceptional gifts" while David Beckham "would have been outstanding in any era, right up there with the all-time greats". Subs in his England XI would be Bobby Charlton and Bryan Robson.
Finney 80? Horrors, a raw sports reporter on BBC radio the other day swore he had never even heard of him. This year is also a milestone for other wingers from the pantheon. Can you of my generation believe, for instance, that Charlie Cooke and Mike Summerbee are each 60 this year - and so are those two Shankly ponies who were wingers in the days of Sir Alf Ramsey's "wingless wonders", Peter Thompson and Ian Callaghan? Just as they would slalom at a breeze down the touchline, so does life itself.
· It is the first springtime for all of 30 years that Derek Randall is not cavorting around a freshly mown cricket field in zestful anticipation. I wonder how he feels. Everybody else is exceedingly sad, that's for sure. England cricket's favourite son, 51 in February, has tossed his pads into the attic and decided even to give his local league a miss this time.
It was in the spring of 1972 that the 21-year-old scamp went out to bat, at No8, in his first county match for Nottinghamshire against Essex at Newark - and clocked Keith Boyce, John Lever and Robin Hobbs for five sixes and four fours in a gleeful 78 that Wisden called "a dazzling spectacular" and John Arlott in these pages described as "the oddest mixture of uncertainty and hectic overconfidence". And the irrepressible Derek just took it from there.
As a fieldsman possibly only Learie Constantine and Jonty Rhodes can have given as much pleasure as Randall, and those two exhilaratingly resplendent Test innings in Australia - 174 in Melbourne in 1977 and 150 at Sydney two years later - each remain in the Top 10 Ashes centuries in history, and allow a warm chorus to this April's all hail and farewell.
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