On the down side, however, the players are now fitter and stronger than ever, we get to see our antipodean cousins far too often for the family's good (that's if you can afford the professional prices at Twickenham in the first place), good, wholesome, old-fashioned, intimate grounds like Sunbury and Heywood Road have fallen off the calendar at the top level, and sometimes it feels like the scrum has morphed from a contest for possession into little more than an elongated jostle for the inevitable penalty. Oh, and referees are producing autobiographies.

All of which pales into insignificance, however, compared with the latest blight on the game. For here we are, less than twenty years into the professional era, nine games into the domestic season, nearly half way through, and Harlequins are at the top of the league table. Read it again. Harlequins. Top. Unbeaten.

How did it come to this? How can professionalism have twisted the fabric of the sport quite so violently as to produce this sort of unsavoury outcome? Heart-of-the-game traditions appear to have been dumped by the roadside like saggy old mattresses, babies thrown out with bathwater on an industrial scale. It makes you fear for the future. Harlequins. Top of the league. I know there's still a long way to go, but still. If you can't count on the effete fancy-dressers from Twickers to do the decent thing and fail miserably, what have you got left?

A journey with the ghost of seasons past might give us an inkling as to how we got to this sad state of affairs. A journey into a semi-mythical land, to a place where the rugby authorities didn't have time for leaky documents or dodgy reviews, or anything except very well catered committee meetings, actually. A time when they'd only just got around to setting up a league structure for their clubs. Seek out a Harlequin player in those days, tell him of the tidings you brought from the twenty-first century, and he'd stare at you through cigar-smoke and an oily alcoholic haze, uncomprehending, before double-checking that he hadn't inadvertently got the dodgy vintage out of the cellar instead of the good stuff. The thought of playing eleven games before Christmas would be bad enough, but winning them all? That'd be just downright vulgar.

Harlequins simply didn't go in for the season-long effort thing in those days. They were a cup team, able to turn it on for the occasional match, but damned if they were going to try too hard like those working-class oiks from the Sudbury area, or those provincial near-Brummies in the Midlands, or those grubby, envelope-stuffing arrivistes in the west. Sure, they'd win games along the way, dispatch a few northern rabbles en route to a respectable but not attention-seeking position in the table, but the thought of doing it solidly for eight months...no. Harlequin FC was more about the 'C' than the 'F'. They didn't go out to play in bow-ties or quaff champagne at half-time, like their spiritual counterparts at Racing Club in Paris, but it was certainly possible to imagine that they were saving themselves for the important stuff after the game. If they couldn't win effortlessly, then they would have to lose effortlessly instead. And if the occasional trier like Brian Moore or Jason Leonard objected, then they were free to play as hard as they wanted. Fat lot of good it would do them.

A reliable club, then. Sometimes difficult to beat, but certainly not a threat over the long-haul. In the mid-noughties they even made the parachute jump into National Division One, as though urged into self-sacrifice by the sheer awful effort of it all. Not that they made a very good fist of it – they came straight back up again. Is professional rugby solely to blame for the apparent demise of this, one of the game's most historic clubs? Can we pin the blame on any individuals?

Step forward Mark Evans. Short. Bespectacled. Welsh, apparently. Used to be at that club Saracens before a spot of bother necessitated a hasty exit. Pitched up at Quins as...what? Coach? Administrator? Svengali? Or all three? Anyway, he brought a touch of something different to the Stoop, the first hints of the infection that would take hold. Speaking in a drawl that was half barrow-boy, half absolute cad, he began to turn attention away from the important things in life, like having a good time, and onto the rather tiresome business of building a professional rugby club. More seats – as though anyone at Quins had ever sat still long enough to need one. Better players, as though being a Harlequin was a matter of skill rather than exclusivity. Apparently there was a difference between coming to the rugby and coming to watch the rugby. He encouraged more of the latter. It was the start of a downward spiral.

Anybody else? Maybe this hulking presence in the shadows. Dean, isn't it? Dean Richards? Bringing horrendous ideas from his previous club. Ideas like ambition, work-ethic, stomach for the fight. Ideas that were anathema to the stalwart Harlequin. You couldn't turn up for a match with your DJ still slung across your shoulders? Well then, what could you do? Becoming a monk would have required less life-change. It was a revolution, of that there could be no doubt, and it was bound to be bloody.

Two men, and now a third. The ghost of the season present directs us towards...who's this? An Irishman? Conor. He's been here before, wearing the colours of another club, but now he's become a Harlequin, and his fingerprints are all over the current malaise. Aided and abetted by those who've been present for the long haul, the likes of Diprose, now a coach, and long serving players like Monye (present for Quins' only win at Adams Park), Easter, Guest, Care, Brown, Robshaw. When you read it like that, it almost looks planned. Structured. As though a team has been built, over the years, with the precise intention of getting better. It's worse then anyone could have imagined. It means the current situation is more than a fluke.

If the ghost of seasons future isn't to show us even more horrific sights, then action is required to tip the rugby world back onto its proper axis. The importance of turning up, having a go, and losing, needs to be drilled into this current crop of Harlequin players, before they get carried away. Someone, some other team, has to remind them of their responsibilities to history, to the grand traditions of their club. It falls to Wasps, to a Wasps team who've recently struggled to live up to their own grand traditions, to try and make the point. It won't be easy. Even before the commencement of hostilities, the medical tent is strewn with the casualties of previous skirmishes. Bell, who was doing a cracking job of Fraser Waters-like defensive leadership. Filipo and Poff, the Kiwi duo giving a real bite to Wasps' forward play. Thompson, able to contribute in only one game. A squad's worth of back-rowers out of action, and this against one of the best units in the league. Those who are left have a Herculean task, but it is one they need to rise to, for the sake of the game. Old enemies will be cheering us on, naturally. Even the Sky commentators, once they've stopped agitating for yellow cards, will settle down and know that this is more than simply another rugby match.

Wasps, before you go off and play a Bayonne team still reeling from an encounter with Imanol Harinordoquy's dad, you have a job to do. Professional rugby's reputation is on the line. Do it for all of us.

Oh, and stop giving silly penalties away, will you?

Allez!

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