You don’t have to be a corporate suit to realise the importance of having an “or else” when negotiating a deal: as in give me what I want or else I’m off. And who are we kidding? What almost everyone wants is money. It doesn’t matter if bargaining is over billions or double overtime – you gotta have an or else, and just as importantly the man has to believe the or else.

So does anyone else get the feeling the IRFU don’t fully believe the French or else that Ireland’s top players keep presenting to them? Sure Johnny Sexton went, but on the back of a lot of well-publicised angst that made it clear he didn’t really want to leave. So is it unreasonable to presume some regret at the IRFU about one that got away, but also a deeply-burrowed suspicion that behind all the posturing these buggers don’t really want to go at all?

If so, the blazers should make the most of it while they can. It ain’t going to last. Panicky headlines about Jamie Heaslip heading to France might just be one of the dying kicks in rugby’s coquettish contract-negotiation two-step, a craze surely in its last phase since the brutal reality of professional sport – obvious you might think – is it’s all about money.

This is worth pointing out because rugby in this country still likes to give a different impression, with various Gypsy Rose Lee-style peep-and-disguise routines, from both sides of the table.

Instead of the stark tot of hard cash, the IRFU affects to play a more subtle hand of cards when it comes to getting top players to sign on the dotted line.

Loyalty card
And they play them well too, pointing out the less than attritional number of games players are required for here, the cherry on top that is selection for the national team, the warm fuzzy feeling of playing for

“your people”, the even warmer feeling of being a big fish in a small pond. And if all fruit fails, there’s even the loyalty card.

There can be substance to that sort of package too, because with a lot of players, there’s a desire not to fix what isn’t broken. Far away fields aren’t always greener, especially tax-wise.

And despite top players employing the usual array of agents, publicists and the assorted paraphernalia of being a very big professional noise, there might even remain enough of the old club-house vibe around the game here that no one wants to be seen to be too motivated by money; a bit too soccer. That too posh to push stuff doesn’t go away overnight you know.

But go away it will. As sure as a Leinster player will never be short of company in Krystle, the hand the IRFU is drawing on is getting weaker by the season. Players increasingly don’t have the luxury of indulging in some perception shuffle. Amid all the hit-hydrated-macros jargon of rugby professionalism, that might be the final lingering old-boy affectation to finally get the heave.

Because it doesn’t matter how nice the accent, or impressive the degree: if you’re a professional you do the job for money. Sure there’s an assortment of flim-flam-like job satisfaction and other vanilla stuff, but it doesn’t even come close to deflecting the focus your mind takes on when your livelihood is on the line.

Heaslip might be using Toulon as a negotiating ploy, the same one Sean O’Brien and Keith Earls might employ. But it only works if the IRFU really believe the or else; and it’s not just those of us peering in from the outside who wonder if Irish rugby internationals are willing yet to be seen to boil things down to their shillings and pence reality. At least not publicly anyway.

If they are not, they will be the final generation of professional Irish rugby players to indulge in such an affectation. Sentiment and loyalty and not playing lots of games are all very well. The perpetual point towards the next World Cup is too.

Talking sentiment
But with serious injury potentially always only the next contact away, if someone is willing to pay you double, then professional logic dictates you sign on the dotted line. Try talking sentiment with the IRFU when you're crocked.

And how bad can getting paid double to move to another country, experience another culture, and learn another language in a climate that isn’t permanently pissing, actually be.

Jonny Wilkinson never exactly pined for Newcastle once he left for France. After eight months at Toulon he recalled the thrill of starting to think in French - “I always wanted to be one of those blokes who can pick up a phone up and immediately start speaking in a different language. It’s pretty cool.”

And it is. Wilkinson is still in Toulon, somehow managing to survive on the Mediterranean coastline, and somehow consistently playing top class rugby, a noticeable achievement in such a supposedly brutal environment considering the player was liable to break if standing up too fast.

Being professional means following the money. There’s a joke about hookers in there somewhere, but if the best rugby money is in France, then that’s where the best will go, regardless of Irish administrative fears about eventually turning into some feeder-league akin to Portugal’s Primeira soccer league.

Fiddling around with the optics of that is an indulgence that can’t be afforded for much longer, something the IRFU are surely going to find out to their cost.