Gerry Thornley: It would be far from satisfactory but wouldn't it be ironic if the only province proudly waving the Irish flag in Europe after January was Connacht?
With less than half the financial resources and hence little like the playing resources of the other three, Michael Bradley's team have arguably produced the best performances of the last two weekends.
Worcester Warriors, after all, lie fourth in the English Premiership and to go toe-to-toe with the bruising Warriors over successive Saturdays, only being denied a bonus point with the last play of the game at the Sixways Stadium and then beat them with the last play at the Sportsground on Saturday, was a phenomenal achievement.
Alas Worcester are still favourites to progress automatically from Pool Five of the European Challenge Cup as they lead Connacht by a point. Even if they finished level, Worcester would go through on the head-to-head record by dint of picking up five match points to Connacht's four. Connacht would need to beat Montpellier at home and Catania away while hoping Worcester, having presumably beaten the Sicilians in their penultimate pool game, were then beaten in Montpellier. It is not inconceivable, although by the same token Connacht's two games shouldn't be taken as banker wins.
True, Connacht rolled Catania over by 62-17 at the Sportsground in the opening round, but it was striking to note over the last two weekends that the Sicilians overturned a 74-12 defeat in Montpellier by winning the return on Saturday by 37-34. It's also worth noting that Worcester only emerged from Catania with a 19-14 win in round two.
Failing qualification by topping their pool, however, Connacht are still reasonably well placed to obtain one of the slots for the three best runners-up. This route would send them to an away quarter-final, most probably against English opposition, as Northampton, London Irish, Gloucester and Newcastle lead the other pools.
There's a feeling among the IRFU and Irish rugby generally that the Challenge Cup, where the strength in depth of the English Premiership is clearly superior to the Top 14 (French league), is a sort of no-man's land for European rugby; hence the apparent preference to banish Connacht there for ever more.
The winners in each of the last four years have been English, with Wasps using their success (when they also won the first of three successive domestic league titles) as a springboard for winning the Heineken European Cup a year later while Sale, winners of the Challenge Cup four seasons ago and last season, are currently atop the Premiership and the number one-ranked side in the European Cup.
Connacht are seeking to qualify for the last eight for the fourth year in a row, and in each of the last two seasons they've lost to the ultimate winners in the semi-finals. Yet there are no Sharks devouring the opposition this year, and having gone toe-to-toe with Worcester, Bradley's team would have no reason to fear any of the other English sides in the competition.
Alas this Challenge Cup route still looks their best bet of qualifying for the European Cup. Fully 20 points adrift of the other Irish provinces in the Celtic League and direct qualification for the European Cup as one of the three leading Irish provinces, Connacht are also nine points off their nearest Welsh challengers (who all have two games in hand) and 16 points behind the Scots, so even the play-off route looks beyond them.
That Connacht are struggling is no surprise. Due to a restructuring of the season to avoid clashes with Test weekends, Connacht rarely bump into Scottish, Welsh or Irish rivals shorn of their frontline players. By comparison to meeting squads with 16 or 17 internationals on their books, Connacht have only three Test players, who have 10 caps between them. Nevertheless, were they to progress to the Challenge Cup quarter-finals in early April, it would help to sustain them through the dark winter months.
Regardless of how that scenario pans out, Irish rugby desperately needs one of the provinces to reach this season's knockout stages of the European Cup if three automatic places are to be assured again next season. Admittedly, as things stand, they are still performing better than their Celtic cousins. Indeed, collectively the Irish teams' winning ratio (58 per cent) is not significantly inferior to recent years, and compares favourably to the Welsh (37.5), the Scots (12.5) and the Italians (0), whatever about the English (74) and the French (61).
As in their opener against Bath, had Leinster enjoyed a little more luck in Bourgoin on Saturday, we'd be viewing things in a more favourable light. Not that they weren't again partly authors of their own misfortune. But aside from failing to stamp out several off-the-ball cheap shots, the bulk of the incorrect decisions by Tony Spreadbury and his officials went against Leinster. True, David Venditti made a genuine, two-handed attempt at an intercept when harshly penalised under his posts for a deliberate knock-on, but against that Shane Horgan was tackled without the ball, a 22 drop-out was wrongly given when the ball was kicked dead from a yard short of the try-line, and Malcolm O'Kelly was taken out in the air off a restart in the lead-up to Benjamin Boyet's drop-goal.
And whatever about the dubious merits of the fateful, match-winning penalty by Alexandre Peclier against the Leinster frontrow for popping up, what about the turnover scrum moments earlier? On a Leinster put-in, Spreadbury ran around to the other side of the scrum from Guy Easterby's feed, and when it went to ground, gave the put-in to Bourgoin. Why? Had he forgotten who's put-in it had been? Maybe there's a bias here, but no less than Nigel Whitehouse in the Bath game, Spreadbury's refereeing was awful.
gthornley@irish-times.ie
