RUGBY HEINEKEN CUP:IT WAS the weekend when the old dogs for the long road bared their teeth and showed their pedigree. The six clubs who have claimed the last 11 Heineken Cups all won, with five of them assuming leadership of their groups.

Meanwhile, two-time runners-up Biarritz took a stranglehold on Pool Four yesterday when turning a 3-3 half-time score at home to a disappointing Ulster into a 35-15 bonus-point victory.

With Aironi to come in December’s back-to-back fixtures, Biarritz will have qualified for the knock-out stages before Christmas if Ulster and Bath share their two head-to-heads. The result denied Ireland’s four proud provinces a clean sweep but as good as any of the elite’s victories were those of Munster and Leinster on Saturday.

Although all four of yesterday’s games yielded bonus-point wins, hitherto, Munster had recorded the only five bonus-point haul over Friday night and Saturday, while Leinster produced arguably the win of the weekend in their 25-23 win over Saracens at Wembley – one of only four away wins in the dozen matches.

Alas, Munster’s 45-18 win over Toulon – which sets up a mouth-watering double-header with the Ospreys in December – came at a cost, with the desperately unfortunate Jerry Flannery aggravating the calf problem which sidelined him for much of a truncated campaign last season after making his belated seasonal re-appearance in the 55th minute.

The Ireland hooker was limited to just six appearances for Munster last season, and although Tony McGahan said the full extent of the injury was not known afterwards, he did reveal Flannery was devastated. That said, the initial diagnosis was the frustrated Flannery had not torn anything, and the injury not too serious, but he will see a specialist this week.

Joe Schmidt was comparatively sanguine about the hip injury which forced Luke Fitzgerald off at Wembley.

“Those deep bruises in the hip can be debilitating to run with. I think that’s what it is. We’ll get him into the medicals tomorrow and get some clarification.”

Schmidt was more annoyed by Brendan Venter’s latest rants at officialdom in the wake of a defeat (as it usually is with the highly intelligent but intense South African). Coaches can be understandably one-eyed, particularly in the immediate aftermath of a game, but even so Venter’s claim, “we were definitely the better team by far but we didn’t get any rewards” was rather laughable.

“I think there should have been 50 more penalties in this game because of all the breakdown rules,” said Venter, who admitted Leinster won the aerial battle.

“There is a real danger that if we don’t take action going into a World Cup year, the game of rugby is going to die, be killed stone dead because the public won’t come to watch,” he maintained before adding, a tad confusingly: “They (the spectators) must have loved this because there was a lot of rugby played out. It wasn’t bad to watch that. The only person that didn’t enjoy it was me.”

Of course it was, supposedly, Saracens who played all the rugby: “Leinster kicked everything they got, they kicked the majority of the time, we ran the ball at them and it wasn’t worth it.”

His rant first delayed Schmidt’s press conference, although it also prompted the Leinster coach to seek out Christophe Berdos to seek clarification about the French referee’s interpretation of the breakdown, and reported Berdos admitted he allowed Saracens to illegally seal off the ball.

The game might die alright if everybody crashed into contact a la Saracens and recycled ad nauseam with no contest for the ball.

“I think it is really difficult with the new regulations and interpretations of the penalty rules,” said Schmidt. “They went through 30 phases at the end of game and for one team to have the ball for 30 suggests there is no contest. I congratulate Saracens in the way they play the game, they play with a lot of width and energy (but) they did play very laterally against us.

“We saw Clermont make 230 tackles and I think we made a fair few tackles today as well so while they (Saracens) keep the ball for very long periods sometimes they don’t make the line breaks.

“If they look at the possession and line breaks made I think there is a very significant message there, which probably Brendan Venter could take from that instead of these state-of-the-nation speeches.” Touche, Joe.

Leinster made more inventive use of less possession – thanks in large part to the 16-8 penalty count in favour of the home team by Berdos – but tellingly, missed only four missed out of 110, which prompted Schmidt to remark that while they showed class with the ball against Racing a week before, here they showed a lot of class without it.

With results elsewhere helping Leinster to establish a four-point lead over Clermont atop Pool 2 before the crunch back-to-back meetings in the Auvergne and the Aviva in December, Schmidt admitted: “If you’d thrown it my way I wouldn’t have hesitated to take it.

“It’s a really good start, although it would have been great if Clermont didn’t get a bonus point today. We’re only a third of the way through the Pool and the real business in the last two thirds is to come. I know Clermont pretty well. They will come hard at us. We have to really go there and take it another step up.”

That’s the Heineken Cup for you. It never gets any easier. But it’s the old dogs who appreciate that better than anyone.