The Parisian sporting community’s favourite Englishman is absolutely right: any of the six French sides could end up as champions As for the rest of Europe… And then the profile of Samoan rugby will fade and the momentum we’ve generated over the last eight years will disappear That is the fear that weighs on my mind.”. But if the game in the islands does not offer the best young players a future – if they have no real chance of making a decent living from their skills – they will go elsewhere, to New Zealand or Australia or further afield. So on the odd occasion that a top team actually agrees to play in the islands, we fly them in and treat them like kings, and then find ourselves out of pocket.
“I have no fears about the playing strength in Samoa; there is a fantastic amount of rugby talent back home. That’s great if you’re pulling in 60,000 people to watch the game, but in Apia, we can get only 10,000 in our stadium.

Under the current touring system, the host nation pay their visitors’ bills but keep 100 per cent of the gate receipts. It’s pretty hard to sell that sort of deal to the boys back home on the plantations.
“How could there be a level playing field when some sides spent three months preparing for the tournament and we got a fortnight? There’s a problem for rugby here and it has to be addressed; if the sport wants to be truly global, the profits from this last tournament must go to the have-nots rather than the haves. We were on 50 per cent less money in ‘99 than we had been eight years previously Fact. In ‘91, when Samoa first took part in the finals, there was at least some sort of equality: it was still an amateur game and, while the big countries were far more heavily sponsored and generally better off, the payments to players were the same This time, there was no equality at all. He and his countrymen may have been too much of a handful for the Welsh on that most emotional of World Cup occasions in Cardiff a little over six weeks ago, but the realpolitik of Test rugby continues to marginalise the islands of the Pacific.
“Can anyone honestly claim that the last World Cup was played on a level field? I don’t think so. “It’s a Samoan trait.” Yet he is not remotely positive about Samoa’s immediate future as a big-league player on the international scene.

I’ve got the rest of this season and another one on top to bring a trophy to Franklin’s Gardens and, while we’re not playing quite as well as I would like, there’s a positive buzz about the place.”
Lam could reasonably be described as the very embodiment of the word “positive”; he is a uniquely forceful loose forward, an elemental figure who invariably appears faster, harder, more athletic and infinitely more energetic than his direct opponent “I don’t feel pain on a rugby field,” he once said. The public expectation is so much greater, simply because we have a public; if the Saints lose a game, the guy in the street lets you know about it And they’ve been starved of silverware, the people here They crave success. While I enjoyed my time up north and found it exciting to be a part of something so new, we were really quite inward-looking at Newcastle because it wasn’t a rugby town.
“Northampton is at the opposite end of the scale. Who knows? He might still have said: ‘Pat, I can’t give you three years because I can’t afford it.’ But that’s all hypothetical What happened, happened, and anyway, I have no regrets.

It’s the one northern hemisphere tournament that really gets noticed Down Under, so to miss out was bitterly disappointing.
“It’s hard to know how Rob would have reacted had all things been equal and we’d taken our place in Europe. The Heineken Cup is a very passionate competition; I’ve played Super 12 rugby in New Zealand and this is every bit as intense. “The Newcastle squad as a whole lost out on a great deal, both in terms of the bonuses they’d expected for winning the title and taking the club into Europe and in terms of their own rugby fulfilment. “I suppose the boycott affected lots of things, directly and indirectly,” agreed Lam. Sadly, the English boycott left him tilting at windmills instead.
He asked for a fresh three-year deal and was knocked back by a newly impoverished Andrew, who could not now count on Heineken Cup revenue to ease the balancing of the Falcons books.