PAUL REES LOOKS AT WHAT MARK MCCALL NEED S TO DO AT SARACENS AS SEVERAL BIG NAMES HEAD FOR THE EXIT DOOR
WHEN Saracens first won the Champions Cup in 2016, they conceded 119 points over nine matches in the tournament. This season Bordeaux-Begles scored 100 points against the Premiership champions in two matches in France and the 15 tries they ran in were three more than Sarries leaked throughout the campaign eight years ago.
As Mark McCall, Saracens director of rugby since 2011, acknowledged earlier this season, his squad is changing with some of the key players behind their seven Premiership titles and three Champions Cup successes moving on, not least Owen Farrell, the club’s talisman and captain who, along with Alex Goode (Jamie George was on the bench) was in the starting line-up when Sarries won the league for the first time 13 years ago. Will he, like Alex Ferguson at Manchester United, create another dynasty?
Farrell and Goode started the club’s first Champions Cup final in 2014 against Toulon in Cardiff, along with the Vunipola brothers, Mako and Billy, who are expected to join Farrell in France next season. George was again a replacement as he was in 2016 when Saracens defeated Racing 92 in the final, a game Maro Itoje started.
Over the last 15 years, Saracens have been able to retain players better than their rivals, many of whom emerged from the club’s academy. Critics will point to the salary cap breaches that ended their dominance four years ago as a reason why, but the affair exposed a system that effectively punished those who developed young English players and then saw their wage bill explode when, as in the case of Sarries, many went on to become established internationals.
This was at a time when England players missed some 40 per cent of the league programme so retaining those whose salaries would have soared from some £20,000 a year to hundreds of thousands would have meant a lack of provision when they were away. It remains, even if the overlap between the Test and club game is smaller, a handicap of the cap. Why produce when you can import?
When the game become open in 1995, Saracens were not seen as potential beneficiaries. Founded in 1876 by the Old Boys of the Philological School in Marylebone, the club played on nine different grounds before settling at Bramley Road in Southgate just before the start of the Second World War.
It was not the grandest of homes with a capacity of 5,000. When leagues started at the end of the 1980s, Saracens were in the second division but quickly won promotion only to be relegated when the top flight was restructured. They lost the likes of Jason Leonard and Dean Ryan to what were seen as bigger clubs but by 1995 were back in the first division.
They should have been relegated at the end of the first professional season, but the Rugby Football Union was persuaded
