Rugby union's reputation takes a hefty blow.

Rugby union's reputation takes a hefty blow.

It is safe to assume that all is not well in the world of rugby union. Sport of course is treading familiar ground here. Remember those formidable and hugely muscled, female East German shot putters and discus throwers who so blackened and disgraced their nation at Olympic Games from yesteryear?Remember Ben Johnson the 100metres sprinter at the 1988 Olympics in Seoul? You could hardly forget him since he was a cheat, caught in the act of taking drugs.

 In the 100m final Johnson ran like the wind, took the sport to breathtaking levels of super perfection only to find that he'd been cheating with narcotic substances. For a few brief moments he was Olympic gold champion only to discover that he'd been penalised, sanctioned with the severest penalty and then told he hadn't won.

Over the weekend sport bowed its head in shameful notoriety once again and this time the crime was equally as heinous and unforgivable. It was all about money. Yes money, the so called root of all evil, the road to ruination, a seedy tale of  financial machinations, financial wrongdoing, penny pinching chicanery, greed, salary capping, monetary mismanagement and general naughtiness. Every so often sport gets stuck in a muddy quagmire of corruption. It gets well and truly up to its neck in a trouble of its own making and then wonders why everybody gets so heated and angry when fingers of accusation and blame are pointed at it.

This time it was the Premiership powerhouse known as Saracens, a hitherto well run, richly successful rugby union team based in North London who have now crossed the line.  Four time Premiership titles to their name, European Champions par excellence and a glittering trophy cabinet that is their pride and joy, Saracens have now fallen out of favour with rugby union's top brass because somehow they thought they could get away with it, cheating brazenly when they must have thought we hadn't noticed and then pleading protestations of innocence when all of the incriminating evidence gave them no chance.

The club that has given us World Cup giants in England captain Owen Farrell, the brothers Mako and Billy Vunipola and Maro Itoje have now been deducted 35 points. But the ultimate punishment has been relegation from the Premiership at the end of the season. It isn't often that sport gets it disastrously wrong but when rugby union, once a bastion of fair and rough play in equal measure, gazes at the mirror today, it may find an ugly blemish on its face that may take a considerable amount of time to remove.

Rugby union is still one of those raw boned, rugged and rumbustious sports where rucks, mauls and line outs frequently punctuate its ebb and flow. It is a sport for crushing, crunching and crashing tackles, where muscular beefcakes are flipped into the air like pancakes and players of the highest quality charge headlong into each other like battering rams. It is a game where prop forwards collide into fly halves as if it were some accidental meeting of heads where no injury or harm was intended.

This time sport tripped up on another banana skin, blinded by some insatiable desire to keep on the right side of legality when quite clearly that was never going to happen. Sarries have not exactly fiddled the books but they have overstepped the mark this time and now they will suffer the consequences of their actions.

We all know what happens when we break the rules in any of life's many scenarios. We pay the price for our foolhardiness, our sloppy negligence, that moment when judge and jury make our judgments of guilt that hits you so hard in your pocket that when microphones are pointed at you and you have to answer for your actions, there can be no hiding place.

And so it is that Saracens face the music at the end of the season. They will be relegated from the Premiership and rather like the condemned men they must be feeling at the moment, it won't feel very pleasant. It is the proverbial bitter pill that when swallowed could take ages to dissolve. It does seem a crying shame that a club with such an impeccable pedigree and status in the game should now be reduced to a piteous wreck with nothing to look forward to apart from mediocrity. Somehow you feel that Saracens deserve much better. At the moment though it's hard to feel any sorrow.