I’m not saying I actually agree with the above statement, but now that the entire Exeter fan base are off speeding up the M5 to topple the Lift Tower like a bunch of ululating Iraqis while burning effigies of Jo Whiley made of Des O’Connor’s armpit hair and seeking to burn down the Grosvenor Centre like a horde of Plaid Cymru voters launching a putsch on the Landtag, we are free to proceed (without me being labelled arrogant if I in anyway criticise NL1, or condescending if I praise it) with the preview of what is set to be the biggest, if maybe not the decisive, match of the Saint’s season.

National League 1, Round 11

EXETER CITY vs. NORTHAMPTON SAINTS

Saturday 10^th November, 2007 – 18:00 MSK

 
The season so far…

Despite this season of successes, a split is starting to emerge in Northampton supporters’ ranks. On the one hand, there are those who believe the heads-up-smile-on-face rugby being forged under Jim Mallinder is like having God-amongst-men Vladimir Putin personally stroke their egos while they are spoon-fed Beluga caviar from the 2000 Heineken Cup, and, on the other, there are those who believe that watching the Saints run up cricket scores against part-timers every week is about as desirable as having an oiled-up, thong-wearing Stuart Barnes read Robbie Kempson’s autobiography through a megaphone while Wales’ Grand Slam 2005 DVD plays repeatedly on a giant screen in front of them for all eternity.

I’m firmly part of the latter group, and the sooner we’re out of this division the better. If we were sticking the better part of 50 points on Wasps and “London” “Irish” every week, then I’d feel as good about myself as a human being as if I’d just spent the morning reading the ‘your comments’ section on an EU-related article on the BBC website. However, while we’re in NL1, the majority of our victories are so irrelevant that I’m surprised the National Assembly hasn’t already made them the basis of its medium-of-Welsh history curriculum.

For as long as Northampton stay in NL1, I am unable to see any Saintly action and, while it might be quaint to experience the Real Rugby™ atmosphere at the other 15 grounds in the division, as an analogy, I’ve spent a lot of time over the last year visiting all 15 former Soviet republics and, although I’m glad I’ve been to them, I have no desire to go back to most of them ever, ever again. This is a must-win match, not least to ensure the Saints do not lose the large following in Russia this season has helped build up. (Russians will get behind any team they think has an unquestionable chance of success; cf. Brazil in football, New Zealand in international rugby, Germany in World Wars.)

The opposition

Exeter Chiefs are a club with ambition, and are one of a handful of NL1 sides with genuine and (for now rather unrealistic) immediate premiership intentions. Exeter were left kicking themselves last year, when a terrible start to their season, in which they started so slowly they could have been a Martin Corry break from the base of a scrum, meant they lost seven games before Christmas, helping to secure The Northern Franchise’s promotion.

Despite board statements that Exeter are seeking promotion this season, all the evidence points to the fact that the 2008/9 season will be when the Chiefs make their full-on premiership bid. Even if they manage to beat the Saints this weekend, their lack of bonus points realistically means that Exeter’s best hope of GP rugby is another relegation for the Yorkshire club and subsequent squad decimation next year. (Although that would ruin the rolling-maul.com message boards, as they wouldn’t be able to go on and on and on and on and on and on about the parachute payment with a feeling of suffering, injustice and hard-done-by-ness so great they must be wearing black g-strings bearing an embroidered silver fern.)

Exeter are a club with a long and proud history; they were formed in the early 1870s and hosted the All Blacks’ first ever game in Europe in 1905. That game came one year after Exeter’s only ever victory over the Saints. To put that in perspective, in 1904, Hungary was a Great Power, Helen Mirren had only bared her breasts in two films, and Lawrence Dallaglio’s bald spot wasn’t quite yet the size of Wales.

The Chiefs have been in NL1 for ten years now, and this season have shown real progression by no longer wearing old Cardiff RFC shirts as part of the IRB’s SOS Kit Aid programme. Exeter’s proudest moment to date came when they were the only team to beat Harlequins in their NL1 tour in 2005/6, grinding out a 13-8 win at a sodden County Ground, a speedway track with a bit of mud in the middle of it.

Now Saints are in Quins’ shoes, though thankfully not wearing multi-coloured quartered shirts so grotesque that the only people who could possibly consider them fashionable are ageing Russian prostitutes, and should note that Exeter also beat Bristol during their promotion year in the Devonshire game. The difference between then and now is that the Chiefs turned fully professional this summer and will not see one high-profile win and mid-table mediocrity as a successful season. There is no room for complacency; this will without doubt be the toughest fixture for the Saints since they won in Little Wales in week 2.

The ground

Devonshire’s second team’s most obvious manifestation of their desire to sit at the top table of club rugby is their new ground, a field nestling next to the Sandy Park Conference Centre. Sadly for Exeter fans, an unfortunate sequence of relegations from the Premiership has led to it consistently being the second best rugby ground in the division.

The Chiefs are looking to push capacity up towards five figures, though it is difficult to see why, as their average gate would lower the average attendance of Russian rugby’s premier league. The current one-stand-and-a-tin-shed design emphasises that the club still have some way to go to achieve actual Premiership-club-in-waiting status. However, the ground has hosted England A and Churchill Cup matches and the West Stand is so impressive that if they actually let away supporters into it, Saints fans could be mistaken for thinking they were at an actual rugby stadium – in this case Twickenham – as the stand is full of people with one headphone in listening to Five Live for the latest score from the Manchester United game, and upper class students in pink shirts rich enough to fulfil an Oxbridge stereotype, but too intellectually poor to get in there or one of the credible Oxbridge reject universities, such as Warwick or UCL. (The poorer students can be picked out with ease – they’ll be the ones who have spent their entire student loans on headdresses to make them look like Village People rejects.)

Not only are away fans not welcome in the West Stand, they are also prohibited from using its toilets, instead having to make do with the aforementioned tin shed/open air latrine, which also doubles as the East Stand. The smell of stale urine therein is only replicated at the very deepest, darkest depths of the ball pond at Cullompton services on the M5.

It is also worth noting that as part of another oversight so hard to believe it could have been the “Simply World Class” banner that until recently adorned the Saints’ official website, Sandy Park has no car parks. Those attending the game will have to use public transport to get to the “Match Day Experience”, with the best option being the train to Digby Holt and the subsequent nerve-wracking walk along the Indiana Jones-esque bridge over the A379. On the plus side, once there, Saints fans who need a drink to calm their nerves after the ordeal will be able to enjoy the novelty of bar staff who can deal with an order more complex than one pint of Guinness...

The teams – Exeter Chiefs

Exeter recruited heavily and well in the off-season, most notably at half-back. Danny Gray was a constant thorn in the Saints’ side in the last game I previewed and arrives from Bristol with a very promising future. An even bigger coup was Exeter’s biggest steal from Wales since they claimed Tommy Cooper from Caerphilly. It wasn’t a great surprise that Clive Stuart-Smith’s double-barrelled surname meant he was forced out of Llanelli before he could prove that he too could ship the ball out to Reagan King and hope that the capped one-time-too-many New Zealander would win each game single-handedly, but his move to the Chiefs was. Only a couple of years ago CSS was getting as much underinformed hype as Danny Care, but a string of injuries so long and unfortunate he could have been a Saints centre put his international and even GP ambitions on ice. Come Saturday, we may well see that CSS’s decision to step down a level wasn’t that ill-informed after all, when he can put himself in the shop window to be part of the Saints’ 2008/9 GP campaign.

Despite utilising them about as often as The Western Mail exercises impartiality and humility, Exeter have the only backs in the league capable of offering serious trouble to the Saints’ back line. Fijian and former British Army player Josh Drauniniu is the key danger, but his effectiveness or lack thereof can depend on how many Fatialofa brothers Peter Drewett decides to stuff the middle with. Both are big units which suck in the defence, but who suffer from a love of crashball so great they make Mike Tindall look like Shane Williams. As such, I wouldn’t be surprised to see Chiefs’ top try scorer so far this term Jason ‘I wonder what his nickname was at school’ Luff alternate with Kevin Geraghty in the outside centre role during the game and Sean Marsden will bring plenty of top-level experience to full back.

The under use of such a threatening back line is largely to blame for Exeter’s almost complete inability to bag try bonuses this season. As Saints learnt last year, if you have a fixation with the pick and drive bordering on Brian ‘I’m an angry little tinker me’ O’Driscoll’s obsession with blaming Ireland’s highly amusing World Cup exit on everyone other than himself, and if the ability to create space and use the ball before an inevitable knock-on after you’ve made about 3 metres after crabbing from side to side of the pitch for five minutes isn’t there, it doesn’t matter if you can hold onto the ball for 20 phases, the continued use of the tactic makes about as much sense as most of Eddie Butler’s metaphors.

However, despite the Exeter pack’s lack of awareness of space around them, at times seemingly so great it would lower the GPA curve in an Alabama sixth grade geography class, they will present a clear and present danger to a Saints pack which has struggled to impose itself on far less impressive units at times this season. The front row boasts ex-Bristol hooker Saul Nelson and another ex-Llanelli ‘the future of rugby’ Scarlets player in New Zealand prop Craig Dunlea. The Chiefs can also call on the services of Saints old boys Brett Sturgess and Matt ‘the quickest front rower since Scott Gibbs’ Grove. Locks Lewis Stevenson, James Hanks and Chris Bentley all have international U21 honours to their names, and the Chiefs lineout has been considerable sounder than the Saints thus far this campaign. Hometown boy and former England U21 Richard Baxter captains from the back of the scrum with the sort of total authority the western press would have you believe characterises Vladimir Putin’s presidency. There’s also the small matter of Exeter’s new performance analyst, Paul Larkin, who has more video footage of Saints than Stuart Barnes has of James Simpson-Daniel in varying stages of undress.

The teams – Northampton Saints

Mallinder’s introduction of a rotation policy, coupled with the players’ newfound ability to play to a game plan rather than acting as individuals as lost as Lawrence Dallaglio without a microphone, and a confidence to back themselves and bravura not seen since Falco last performed Der Kommissar on the Donauinsel have resulted in tries coming from all over the park. The Saints back line still rates among the best in Europe and has been parting opposition defences so easily that many have been left spread as wide as underage Wellingborough single-mothers after a Saturday night out on the Barcardi Breezers.

Carlos Spencer may not being playing in his favoured fly-half role, but he has been running the game from full-back with customary vision and incisiveness. If Exeter continue with their love of the kicking game, expect Spencer, Reihana and cross-code starlet Chris Ashton to see more balls than the Stade Français photography team. Centres Neil Starling and Jon Clarke are welcome recent returnees following long-term injury lay-offs, though I expect only one of them to start to accommodate James Downey’s Quinlan-like defence. Other players who have done water boy time of late who I expect to return are half-back pairing Mark Robinson and Barry ‘what? Only 90%? I knew we should have signed Mark Mapletoft’ Everitt.

Up front, the Saints pack is going to have to improve significantly after their last few outings saw them on the Dewi Morris side of some 30-minute humpings normally only witnessable by over-18s, but a front row comprising any of Tom Smith, Soane Tonga’uiha, Dylan Hartley and Euan Murray should be more than able to hold their own. Big Damien Browne’s injury will mean a lot of lost ballast at scrum time, so Christian Short may again have time to prove he can do more than cause more disruption to opposition lineouts than the London Welsh front row cause at Pukka Pies conventions. In the back row, I expect pragmatism to favour physicality over mobility with a Tupai-Fox tandem topped off by Mark Easter and backed up by Karl Rudzki on the bench, a combination that will offer more grunt than the clientele of the Ladies’ toilets at any Bridge Street bar at five to midnight on a Friday night - which is going to be needed if Saints' 'no, after you' attitude at the breakdown is to be discarded like Leicester Tigers ground development plans.

The teams – the line-ups

As the Saints are less likely to reveal their team before match day than President Vladimir Putin is to publish pictures of his (very legal) daughters topless with their hair in Tymoshenko braids, I can only speculate, but I expect the teams to line-up something like this:

Replacements:

Bristol B: 16. Sam Blythe, 17. Shane Kingsland, 18. Dan Parkes, 19. Chris Bentley, 20. Alan Miller, 21. Tony Yapp, 22. Gary Kingdom.

Saints: 16. Paul Shields, 17. Soane Tonga’uiha, 18. Alex Rae, 19. Karl Rudzki, 20. Ian Vass, 21. Stephen Myler, 22. Paul Diggin.