So how do you like your rugby, rugby-lovers? With horrible, crabbing attacks and shapelessness, with no mauls, no serious scrums, the false pace of tap-and-run, mass cheating at the breakdown, the near-disintegration of refereeing and its replacement by random whistling, and the craven abandonment of the IRB charter meant to preserve all that is great and singular and treasured in the game? Hail, the current southern hemisphere “rugby” season. And to hell with it.

Never fear, rugby as we love it returns across Europe on Saturday, without false gods. The Premiership in England will be the biggest to date and elsewhere around the UK, the best Magners League season, too. Thank goodness the 33 experimental law variations (ELVs) that caused the southern disaster have been slashed to 13 for the season here, with the good old Irish Rugby Union playing a heroic role in resisting the full raft. Bless their little green socks.

Let’s play the IRB’s game by trialling the 13 and then abandon most of them. Rugby in the northern hemisphere is too successful, too confrontational, too appealing, too bloody aggravating and too different to have everything forced into jeopardy because a few IRB “experts” and a load of Australians – helped by the sheer, witless gullibility of rugby in New Zealand and South Africa – want change for change’s sake and their own selfish interests.

There will be another day of reckoning in one year when some of the discarded experiments will come back round, like a pernicious virus. But for now, let’s celebrate the escape. The news is joyous for this season and at the very end of it, the Lions are back, and for me they still represent the highest point of the sport, just a step above the glories of the World Cup.

And what a dream team. Young master Danny Cipriani at fly-half alongside the superlative Gavin Henson and outside the muscular, game-breaking Mike Phillips, with a mini generation of Irish backs rising and Paul O’Connell with a career to finally vindicate for ever; the talented James Haskell and Tom Rees and a few English yeoman up front and Shane Wil-liams scudding round hard grounds. June seems a warm prospect.

Those of us who believe that South Africa vies with Newport as the most stunning, sensuous and dangerous rugby place can hardly wait.

Let us applaud, too, the gesture of the English clubs in moving their season around so that the Lions can leave together and that the first tour match, at the evocative Royal Bafokeng stadium in Rustenburg on May 30, no longer clashes with the Premiership final. And let us hope that all season everyone continues to put Lions interests at the top of the agenda.

Before then, there will be endless fascination as the two powerful professional leagues, in France and England, swing into action.

There could be more than 50,000 at Twickenham on Saturday for the Wasps-London Irish and Harlequins-Saracens double-header and if Franklin’s Gardens could take them, there could easily have been the same for the mouth-watering Northampton Saints-Worces-ter Warriors clash a week today as the grand old Midlands leviathan returns to the top flight.

The French clubs are already joined in battle in the Top14, fervent and vivid and in part, mad as hatters. The celebrated All Black Dan Carter soon arrives in Perpignan, but the arena is so packed with costly imports that he will hardly stand out. Montpellier have already beaten Toulouse. Tou-lon’s budget is so vast they deserve a seat at the table of the G8 nations. Later in the autumn we have the Heineken Cup, full of global giants from all nations, with Leinster and the Ospreys threatening to join the English and French clubs and mighty Munster among the true elite In the Test arena, England will improve out of sight (because they cannot get worse) under Martin Johnson, and they face an autumn programme of overwhelming significance in which they must (yes, must) beat New Zealand and South Africa and Australia. All three.

As I have said before, all the traditional excuses spouted by successive England coaches will no longer be valid. They have players who are fit and rested, and in the Autumn they will be at home against teams beaten up by the stresses of a long season.

Do not talk to us about the process of developing a side, Martin. Bring that side ready and complete. The All Blacks never ramble on about striving for an indeterminate point in the future. They win their games. Today. And please, Twickenham, keep Rob Andrew in the background. His recent horrible, inaccurate and self-preserving attack on Sir Clive Woodward constituted the most grossly unfair outpouring by any rugby official I can remember for 20 years. Woodward was light years ahead of anything Twickenham, or rugby at large, ever came up with.

This autumn will be monumental all over. Wales , if they are to improve further, must start to knock off southern hemisphere giants, too. They must also decide whether James Hook is given his head at fly-half. Ireland, now under Declan Kidney, have an odd squad with parts in serious decay but others showing strong new roots. Scotland, for all their slow improvements in the Test and domestic professional arena, must first demonstrate that they have arrived at Go, let alone passed it.

The Top14 in France and the Guinness Premiership have thrown some of rugby out of alignment. They have terrified Australia, New Zealand and South Africa by buying their players – in the case of France, too many – though it is instructive that all bar one of the 12 English clubs discarded more players than they signed for this season.

The success of the top two leagues have forced the big three down south to abandon their rules that Test players must be playing at home; caused them to consider bizarre add-ons to Super Rugby and try to increase their own commercial appeal with the bonkers ELVs and only succeed in making the Tri Nations boring through familiarity.

They have also accused the major clubs of making a power play. At least the IRB and the RFU have realised that the clubs are merely exerting their rights, and want nothing more. The truth is that the rest of the world should watch and learn. The Premiership, statistically, is the closest-fought major oval-ball league anywhere in the world. The bottom team can often win away at the top team. That comes from hard work, and it definitely comes from upholding the sacred principle of relegation, the prospect of which galvanises teams. If there is no demotion, clubs decay and recede.

Yet the strength also comes from independence from the national unions, so that the pro teams are not run as an adjunct of headquarters. This comes also from the fiscal punch of a group of owners for which rugby can give heartfelt thanks, and contrast its good fortune with that of football and the charlatans making a mess of that sport.

But above all, the lesson is this. If you want to entertain, and if you want to draw televi-sion deals and crowds and grow rugby union, you must give the game’s followers what they want; rather than patronising them and serving pap, and assuming that they do not want complexity. You accept rugby for what it is. The Real Thing, thank goodness, starts this week.