By PerryGo
May 18 2002

As any traditional Harlequin knows (and, if he doesn’t know already, SW-C will shortly find out) ‘Caps’ and ‘Collars’ are banking instruments widely used in the City of London. So too are ‘Floors’, but Harlequins don’t like to talk about those after the season we’ve just had…

They’re all types of ‘Options’ contract, but the only ‘Cap’ that will be exercising Mark Evan’s mind, as he looks to build next season’s Quins squad, is the annual Salary Cap agreed to by the Premiership clubs. And, far from providing him with options, it’s more likely to provide him with headaches.

Introduced in the wake of the disastrous failures of Richmond and London Scottish (both ‘merged’ with London Irish to create…well, London Irish..) the ‘Cap’ puts an aggregate cash limit on what a club can pay its playing squad for the season.

It’s intended to stop a few clubs trying to buy success on the field ‘soccer-style’ by recruiting at runaway salary levels and, in the process, bankrupting other clubs who then have to pay beyond their means to compete in the player salary market.

Set for next season at £1,854,000, the challenge is how to fit a quart into a pint pot. Assuming a squad of say 35 players, it allows for an average of about £53,000. Not bad, you might say. But with the top players commanding up to £200,000 a year, it means that just one Thomas Castaignede-type will set you back nearly one-eighth of your total budget.

Or put another way, for every two players paid £100,000 each, you need to find four at less than £30,000 each to keep in budget overall.

Maybe there’s the answer for the despairing supporter who can’t understand why on earth so-and-so is playing for the club. “He may not be very good, but he was cheap…”

So – what’s the best strategy? Buy half a dozen of the world’s best and surround them with whoever you can get on the cheap? Or try to stay close to the average throughout the squad?

Difficult one. It was widely reported that the strategy of Saracens’ (or ‘Salaries’ as they are affectionately known outside of Watford) was to recruit a small elite group of superstars, to whom they were reputedly paying very big bucks, and balance this out by filling up the squad with journeymen and young apprentices.

Gambling on the big names staying healthy, the wheels came off the wagon when injuries took their toll and Sarries were forced to turn to their second class citizens, plus a few emergency recruits, to bale them out on the pitch. It was also said that the widely known gulf in earnings between the ‘haves’ and the ‘have nots’ playing alongside each other in the same team affected morale and caused resentments.

Of course, big names put bums on seats too, although I’m sure that never came into Nigel Wray’s thinking…

So how do other clubs manage it? Take Leicester. How can they maintain such an impressive squad, with such strength in depth of quality players? Leicester’s typical second team could probably hold their own in the Premiership.

The answer is that success is compelling, and thanks to the Tigers’ impressive track record – both in winning trophies and in generating international recognition for their players - they can attract and retain players at slightly lower cost than most of the rest. They’ve also been successful in developing their own home-grown youth players, who maintain a strong identity with the club, and in recruiting wisely a small number of carefully chosen outsiders, like Josh Kronfeld and before him Pat Howard, who mould themselves into the Leicester ‘team ethos’ rather than swanning around as the new superstar.

In the early years of professional rugby (or ‘officially professional’ rugby…) Harlequins were felt by many to have fallen into the trap of buying in big names from overseas – players well past their best, looking for a soft but lucrative option to see out their last couple of playing years - in a desperate attempt to keep up with the others. Concurrent abandonment of their junior sides did nothing to dispel the concerns.

You can see why it is tempting to try to buy in ready made talent from overseas and build a team around it. It works to some extent – look at Gloucester this year, where PSA must have needed more translators than coaches in the changing room.

Equally, though, you could say such a strategy has consistently failed to work for, say, Bristol.

And, for a different model again, what about London Irish who, despite the jibes about ‘London South Africans’, and ‘Spot The Irishman’ competitions, have succeeded under Brendan Venter in recruiting a talented team of lower profile players who have performed together outstandingly this season.

So what’s the answer?

Long term, the Leicester model has a lot going for it. You can’t argue with success. But what about short term? With the spectre of relegation hanging over everyone – remember London Irish were most pundits’ Tip for the Drop last August – fear of failure will continue to drive recruitment strategy in many quarters. After all, every club starts the season with a theoretical one-in-twelve chance of being ejected from the Premiership.

Maybe it’s not so complicated and the right approach for clubs like Quins is a blend of what’s working elsewhere:

• Building a sensible youth policy, bringing in players of the quality of Bell and Duncombe
• Focusing overseas recruitment on players with ‘character’ not just a ‘CV’ – people such as David Wilson and, it seems, André Vos
• Developing a pride in the shirt, players willing to lay down their lives for one another on the pitch – that essential but elusive ‘team spirit’ that rows over salaries can so easily disrupt
• And - dare it be said? - encouraging the players to go out and enjoy their rugby together, something that appeared to be lacking in the over-coached, sterile rugby Quins played for the first half of this season. And for most of the second half too, for that matter. But that was for different reasons. And that’s another story.

Does anyone cheat with the Salary Cap? Of course not. After all, no-one ever did during the amateur era