Saracens have won the second halves of their past four matches by a 149-0 aggregate. Their average scoreline in the same four games is 54-11. It seems the fug that disrupted the middle of their season – some might call it international rugby – has well and truly passed.
If November/December was a good time to play them and February/March not bad, the Saracens machine is purring again just when it matters, the long, brutal English season reduced now to the only two weekends that really count. Wasps, not afraid of a play-off themselves, travel to north London on Saturday for quite the Premiership semi-final assignment.
“We’re in a very good place,” the blindside flanker Maro Itoje said. “We have a strong team that unfortunately had a couple of injuries, but some big players are coming back for us, so all in all we’re moving in the right direction at the right time.”
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The biggest of the players is Billy Vunipola, who makes his latest comeback after an injury-disrupted 18 months, lining up opposite another England No 8 returning from injury, Nathan Hughes. Saracens are not without absentees even now, but the sense of a force gathering at the right time is difficult to deny, an echo of the Leicester and Wasps teams that dominated English rugby for so long, mastering the play-off system.
There are parallels between Saracens’ season and England’s, although Eddie Jones’s team might be said to find themselves where Saracens were at the turn of the year, reeling from an unfamiliar combination of consecutive defeats. Itoje and Owen Farrell, the new England captain, are among those players who have turned Saracens round, which has encouraging implications for England’s tour to South Africa next month, the more so if Saracens’ form continues over the next couple of weekends.
Itoje himself was the subject of scrutiny during the Six Nations, questions asked of his state of mind and body, the jewel of English rugby seemingly tarnished by the demands of the modern game. His response has been decisive.
“You know what, talk of tiredness doesn’t really bother me. I know how I was feeling. I know my body. Since then we’ve had some good weeks at work and some down weeks, and I’m feeling good.”
Some of the down weeks are attributable to those tribulations midwinter. Saracens scraped through to the quarter-finals of Europe, and a trip to Leinster a fortnight after the Six Nations proved an assignment too much even for their returning form. That was five games ago. Interspersed between the subsequent romps against Premiership opposition have been two rare weekends off, leaving the team simmering in a way that was impossible when they last played in a Premiership play-off, a year ago at Exeter, the weekend after they had won the Champions Cup.
To ask anyone in the Saracens camp this week about the difference between now and then was to be met with a look of disdain, as if they were being invited to explain away their absence from last season’s Premiership final by as human a failing as fatigue. Saracens have long ago dispatched any suggestion they can play only one way, but what underpins the cavalcade of points (they have scored more this season than anyone since the 26-round Premiership of 1999, and their points differential is the best by anyone) is ruthlessness.
For the neutral, Wasps are the perfect opponents. If any team have a chance of teasing out the fluffier side of Saracens, it is them, their commitment to the brilliant as unswerving as it is life-affirming and effective.
At the heart of it, Danny Cipriani has finally earned the England call‑up for which so many have clamoured. He and Farrell represent perhaps the pick of some delicious head-to-head battles this weekend. They may feature side by side for England in South Africa. Cipriani enthused about the prospect this week. Farrell’s reaction when asked if he was looking forward to it was to narrow his eyes and say: “Not yet.”
The flamboyant and the ruthless. England hope they might dovetail in June. This weekend they face off.