With the wage cap in England topped at £4million a year,Toby Booth is concerned the larger budgets and squad sizes in France will facilitate them to perform more consistently in both domestic and European competitions.
He said: “Dave [Ellis] and I had a little chuckle last week about operational budgets in France compared to the Premiership. There is Bayonne, I believe, who have just increased their budget by €4.3 million - they have increased their budget by the wage gap that we actually work on, so from that point of view it certainly isn’t going to get any easier, and makes things tough.
“It is going to make it harder to compete on two fronts across the board, not just for use but for anyone in the Premiership. Because there is only so many players that people have got and it’s about how you deal with dents, sometimes you don’t have options to rotate the players and sometimes it is just about getting a team out, and that puts different pressures onto players, staff and management.”
Defence coach Ellis, who also works with the French side and has been at Brive and Castres, issued similar words of concern. He said: “You will find more and more top French teams dominating the quarter-finals of the European competitions.
“A team I know quite well is Agen, who have just been promoted from the French second division and their budget is €9 million, as an example.
“The top two or three teams from England will always be in with a shout at winning the competition, but you just have to look at Toulouse, and clubs like Toulon and Racing Metro – with the amount of players they have got in their squads they can play a team for their Top 14 matches, then also have a second team available to play in the Heineken Cup – and you can say that about five or six of the top French sides.”
Despite this, Booth is in buoyant mood about Irish’s chances in the coming season: “We find ourselves in a situation where we are here to win every game, and if we win every game we have a chance of winning silverware.
“The Heineken Cup draw has given us an opportunity to mark ourselves against the big teams: the teams which have performed year on year, but also the new boys on the block with the financial muscle who are staking a claim [Munster, Ospreys and Toulon].
“We, as a group, are in a position where we believe that we can win every game, that we can win the Heineken Cup, that we can win the Premiership, that we can win the LV Cup – if we didn’t then we would be wasting our time.”
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