Faraway fields aren't always greener

On Rugby: We're into the beef of the season now, albeit swilled with amber nectar. The onset of the Heineken European Cup always gets the juices flowing, and possibly as a foretaste of the Six Nations, which Martin Johnson believes Ireland have their best chance of winning in a long time, this year promises to be even more competitive than ever.

Sure the English Premiership and the French Championship are regarded as the heavyweight leagues, and undoubtedly they benefit from having sugar daddies and more expensively assembled squads, with comparatively little limitations on the importation of foreign players.

In the longer term, this has obvious implications for Team England especially, and to a lesser extent, Team France. Compared to any of the leading teams in England and France, the Irish provinces serve Team Ireland far better. That's for another day, circa February and the Six Nations, although this may have more immediate drawbacks when it comes to Europe.

It's hard to quibble with Declan Kidney's observation that Leinster's second opponents on Saturday week, Bath, are further down the track than his team, given they've had seven competitive matches together whereas Kidney and the Leinster think tank have only had three games to assimilate their Irish frontliners, those returning from injury and new signings Guy Easterby and David Holwell.

Their first outing together last Friday at the Ospreys would have been quite an eye-opener, for Holwell especially. Rarely would he get man and ball together to such an extent in a month of Super 12 matches, where rush or blitz defences are not exactly commonplace and bouts of endless continuity are the norm.

Better that his eyes were opened last Friday than next Saturday in Treviso. But it would have been better still had he and his team-mates another half-dozen games together.

As an aside, I still wonder about Leinster's preference for switching their home games from fortress Donnybrook to the wider, open confines of Lansdowne Road. Of course, the ERC and the Leinster Branch treasurer are delighted. The ERC can boast of their tournament's growth in tangible terms and want more clubs to switch their "home" quarter-finals to bigger stadia.

But should the bean counters be in control of these decisions? Should they first not be purely footballing choices?

Munster's 49-point haul in Limerick against Cardiff hinted that they are closer to their optimum best. They had a more established coaching and team base to begin with, with less new combinations to locate. Midfield still looks problematic, although Rob Henderson's apparent return to health and form looks timely.

Most encouraging of all perhaps was Ronan O'Gara's performance and his increasing understanding with a rejuvenated Christian Cullen, as witnessed by the latter's seventh and eighth tries of the season off well-disguised grubber-kicks by the Irish outhalf in what was only their fifth game ever together.

O'Gara will have more pressurised days it is sure, but his ability to take the ball flat, weigh up options in a nanosecond, execute flat passes off either hand and even throw in a feinted pass before grubbering - aside from kicking 19 points and creating two tries - was a master class.

À la 1-0 to the Arsenal, we know that the days of boring, boring Munster had long since vanished. Indeed, one can not recall a Munster team with so much scoring potential in it nor, it would appear, one more porous. If they're not careful, they're going to get a reputation as the great entertainers. Allez les rouges! Not, of course, as remotely entertaining or as stupefyingly brilliant as anything to come out of the Sky-hyped English Premiership. This is not to castigate Sky Sports. One recalls a Munster fan climbing to the gantry at Thomond Park after one game last season, shaking Miles Harrison and Stuart Barnes by the hand and simply saying: "You do a great job for rugby."

For those of us with Sky Sports, or the interest to go and find a big screen, their coverage provides a variety which terrestrial TV channels have never managed. But, no less than football, let's not get sucked in by the hype. The Premiership looks better in part because of the better sound effects, graphics and number of cameras than, say, Setanta's more financially challenged coverage of the Celtic League.

Nevertheless, the strength, quality, or otherwise, of a given league is largely about perception. Where is the empirical evidence that the English Premiership or the French Championship are considerably superior to the oft-derided Celtic League? For sure, English or French sides have won the European Cup for the last five seasons, and all but one of the nine so far (when, as we are continually reminded, English clubs did not compete).

But, in many cases, it's been a tight call, and overlooks more meaningful analysis. In the nine-year history of the European Cup, the win-loss ratio of the Irish teams (56.10 per cent) compares pretty favourably with the English (59.36 per cent) and the French (57.84 per cent), and that's when playing catch-up after the early years. In 21 head-to-heads between the Celtic League and the Premiership last season, the tally was tilted 11-10 to the English by Wasps' win over Munster in that epic semi-final. The 20 pool games had been shared with 10 wins apiece.

So don't be fooled. And the Celtic League is stronger than ever this season. Their entrants in the European Cup, all nine of them, mightn't be as inferior as we're sometimes led to believe.

The problem for the Irish provinces is how quickly they can compensate for a comparative lack of game-time together.