Rugby Union: The moments of 2010

It started, comically enough, with a biscuit: not any old biscuit, mark you, but a rather superior chocolate concoction, generously provided by the Rugby Football Union's disciplinary department. By consuming this item at the wrong moment - that is to say, while being informed of his punishment for behaving provocatively towards a group of Leicester supporters during a highly-charged Premiership match at Welford Road - the Saracens boss Brendan Venter pushed both the governing body and his own luck just a little too far.

The RFU, acutely sensitive to breaches of the sport's “core values” after the fake blood affair at Harlequins and the drugs-related scandals at Bath, threw the book at him, barring the South African from Twickenham and its environs on Premiership Grand Final afternoon as part of a 14-week match-day coaching ban. If this penalty was wildly excessive, bordering on the vindictive, it undeniably added a certain frisson to the showpiece event of last season's domestic campaign.

Perhaps it was inevitable, given the circumstances, that Saracens and Leicester should find themselves contesting the final on the last Saturday in May, just as there was an overpowering whiff of destiny about the way the game unfolded. While it fell just short of the summit reached by the captivating Heineken Cup quarter-final between Leinster and Clermont Auvergne that had been fought out in Dublin some seven weeks previously, it was undoubtedly the finest match between two English clubs in recent memory.

Venter was not there in body - he watched the game on television at his home in St Albans, in the company of his five-year-old son Joshua - but he was there both in spirit and, in a sense, facially. Hundreds of Saracens supporters turned up with Venter masks, and if this was the last thing the RFU's hangers and floggers wanted to see, there were a good many rugby followers up and down the land who thought the protest wholly justified and entirely worthwhile.

Saracens had started the season successfully, winning nine of their first 10 games and drawing the other, but their rugby had been as dull as ditchwater: scrum, arm-wrestle, kick, arm-wrestle, penalty, three points, start all over again. Yet a minor adjustment to the refereeing of the tackle area liberated them. Instead of kicking their way to Twickenham, they counter-attacked their way there. Some of the stuff produced by Alex Goode, Glen Jackson, Schalk Brits, Andy Saull and Ernst Joubert at the back end of the campaign was stunning - particularly in the two victories at Northampton that gave the Watford-based side their route into the final.

Joubert, a thoughtful and accomplished No 8 from the Western Cape, brought the best of himself to the big occasion, scoring a breathtaking try down the left during a first half in which the lead changed six times, and then summoning a repeat performance after the break to close what had suddenly become a threatening Leicester lead. Jackson, responding brilliantly to the challenge of ending his career on a note high enough to shatter glass, kicked quite beautifully in underpinning the Saracens comeback, and as the game moved into its final minute, Venter's men found themselves a point ahead.

There was not much left for them to do, save organise themselves defensively and deal with a Leicester restart from halfway. In the event, they did neither of these things. Toby Flood drop-kicked the ball high into the Twickenham sky, and in one of those occasional “straight off the training field” moments Scott Hamilton pilfered possession from under his opponents' noses, thereby setting in train the decisive act of the contest - and, indeed, the season. Ben Youngs, who had scuttled clear for a fine try before the interval, went a-scuttling once again towards the Saracens 22. The scrum-half was caught high by Jackson, and as the Saracens defenders turned towards the referee Dave Pearson in horrified expectation of a fateful blast on the whistle, Dan Hipkiss, fresh from the bench, wrenched himself free from a couple of flailing hands and sprinted over for the winning try.

“Inevitably, there's a 'what if?' feeling amongst the players,” admitted Joubert afterwards. “But when we sit back and reflect, we'll see this as a very important stepping stone. We're more than just rugby players now. We've become friends. And we know that with some exciting additions to our squad for next season, we can really look forward to what's coming.”

Those planned additions - the England wing David Strettle and the Scotland back-rower Kelly Brown, to name but two - duly materialised, and Saracens remain a serious Premiership force. But Venter, at odds with the disciplinarians once again, is about to return to Cape Town for family reasons, and there will be no like-for-like replacement, for the very good reason that there is no one remotely similar to be found anywhere on Planet Rugby. If, as some suspect will happen, the club loses much of its essential energy as a consequence, the events of last May might, in the last analysis, mark the end of something strange, rich and compelling. Biscuit anyone?