Pain, but no gain, in Carter experiment

The French call it le Sabbatique, which sounds so much more grandiose than our boring old sabbatical. But around Perpignan right about now I'd imagine they've got a few more choice words they would use to describe Dan Carter's ill-fated stint with the rugby club.

Carter arrived in the Catalan stronghold in the south of France accompanied by significant fanfare and expectation, the poster child of the new world of big-money, short-term signings designed to provide immediate impetus for clubs prepared to shell out the exorbitant sums required.

Forget long-term solutions, this deal was all about the short-term fix and the temporary, but satisfying, jolt of satisfaction that went with it. Both for Carter, in terms of his bank balance, and the French club in the knowledge that, for the time being, they had the best in the business in their midst.

But Carter's season-ending partial rupture to his achilles tendon is am an inglorious end to a tenure that was hailed as both revolutionary and trend-setting -- a brief stint away from his regular place of employment that was supposed to showcase the world's greatest rugby talent in a competition that would revel in his embellishment.

It was also, so the spin doctors informed us, to be a welcome respite for Carter from the grind of the New Zealand season, where he could benefit from the change of scenery, as much by the significant deposits in his bank account.

Sadly, it's all rather collapsed in a heap, which, as we all know, can happen in rugby. It's a brutal sport. Injuries happen. All too often. Nothing can be taken for granted in terms of one's physical state of readiness.

All of which will now be exceedingly obvious to Perpignan who have most probably spent the hours following Carter's crushing injury in front of 80,000 Parisians at the Stade de France scanning not the list of medicos equipped to handle his rehabilitation, but rather the fine print in their own insurance deal.

Perpignan stand to lose rather a lot more than the player who was supposed to lead them to the elusive French Top 14 championship they so cherish.

They've almost certainly coughed up a fair amount of the 700,000 euros ($NZ1.7 million) they were reputedly paying for Carter's services. That was meant to stretch out to the equivalent of $82,000 per match, which isn't a bad sort of fee when you think about it.

Some sort of insurance will likely kick in, ensuring Carter receives his due and Perpignan aren't forking out wild sums of money for a player that is effectively no longer of any use to them.

But it's sure to be a salutary lesson, particularly when you do the sums on what the ambitious French club have received for their investment.

The two-time IRB player of the year, who will apparently spend the next six months recovering from his twist of fate, managed just five matches, or 361 minutes of action, and in that time scored 45 points for his new club.

Roughly translated, that equates to $340,000 per match, or more succinctly, $4709 per minute, at an hourly rate of $282, 540. Or, taking another method of measurement, $37,777.77 per point contributed to the cause. And you thought plumbers had it good.

Of course, vast sums of money for relatively limited amounts of athletic endeavour, are by no means the sole preserve of rugby. These days professional footballers in Europe don't get out of bed for less than $100,000 a week. And that's just the journeymen.

But for me the failed Carter sabbatical raises some much bigger issues.

One wonders if Perpignan's experience won't have done for the concept altogether. He arrived too late to save their Heineken Cup qualifying hopes, and has stayed around barely long enough to have made a blip on the graph of their French championship campaign.

Given the wide-ranging implications of the global credit crunch, and the anecdotal evidence of the Carter experiment, it's hard to imagine other clubs exactly jumping on the bandwagon. Gee it worked for Perpignan, let's give it a go!

Plus, from the New Zealand Rugby Union's perspective there must be some major concerns. Given that Carter had already injured the achilles tendon in question, and could well have been rushed back for the fateful visit to Stade Francais, it raises some doubts about things such as injury management, and player welfare.

Clearly when you're forking out such large sums for a player who's only hanging around for the season, the long-term welfare of the individual in question isn't exactly a priority.

This should concern the NZRU when future such "sabbaticals" are put before them.

Plus, if Carter misses the Tri-Nations is there any sort of compensation in place? What does the NZRU receive if their key player isn't available for the primary competition of the year? Is their ‘brand' damaged by Carter's likely absence? All because a club, temporarily charged with his wellbeing, may not have taken due care with him.

Maybe it was just one of those rugby things. Maybe. But there's a whiff of the distasteful about this. Carter had been complaining of achilles problems for three weeks. Did he receive the right medical advice? Was there a risk in him playing in this match in Paris?

A lot of questions. And one major answer: no one, with the possible exception of the face of Jockey underwear, has been a winner in this. 

What's your view of the Dan Carter injury? Does it show that the sabbatical concept is ill-fated? Post your comments below.

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