It is now a dozen years since play-offs became a part of the Premiership rugby landscape. Time enough, surely, for everyone to grow accustomed to the concept and plan accordingly. Not if you study the past fortunes of teams who have topped the table in the 22-game regular season. Only on four occasions out of 11 have the league leaders become the champions of England.
Which is why no one involved with Saracens is assuming anything before Saturday's capital-splitting semi-final against Harlequins. Yes it would be nice if Saracens – having finished nine points clear of their rivals – received something tangible for winning what Australians like to call "the minor premiership" but all concerned have known for months the domestic season does not end until 31 May.
The trick is to act and think smart. Not to start completely afresh, necessarily, but to clear the head. Within the camp, a conscious decision has been taken to avoid weary phrases such as: "It's been a long season" because of the subliminal negativity it fosters.
"It's amazing where your mind will take you if you let it go there," says Philip Morrow, Saracens' head of strength and conditioning. Mentally and physically, his squad seem appreciably sharper than this time last season, when they were beaten in the semis of the Premiership and the Heineken Cup. "We understand that what we've done in the Premiership now counts for diddly squat," says Mark McCall, their director of rugby. "We've progressed a lot this season and can reel off loads of stats but we know it doesn't matter. We've just got a very difficult game against Quins."
That simple acceptance of play-off reality is crucial. In past years sides such as Gloucester – who finished top of the table three times in six seasons between 2003 and 2008 yet never won a trophy – simply could not get their heads around the sprint finish aspect. Wasps, in contrast, used to love it. Their fitness trainer Craig White was the architect of a strategy which saw them train like men possessed, wearing bin bags to make them sweat even more, when everyone else was tapering down. Wasps's players felt it gave them an edge and took everyone by surprise on an annual basis.
Times, though, have subtly changed. Morrow is extremely familiar with White's end-of-season blueprint but believes today's increasingly physical game is best navigated via intense, carefully tailored bursts throughout the year. Saracens, unusually, train together only three times per week – as opposed to most clubs' four – and do not bother with a team run 24 hours before a game, preferring to give their players the day off. They also routinely rotate their players and identify booster weeks in which to do extra work on building an individual's muscle or fitness.
"We don't look at the pre-season as a time for physical development and the season as a time just to maintain it," says Morrow, previously involved with Ulster and the Ireland national team. "We try to build throughout the year. We don't want guys to be losing muscle ... we think they can get stronger and more powerful during the year." It is not unusual, he says, for some players' to put on 4kg of lean muscle in a season.
The defence coach Paul Gustard reckons the club are also reaping increasing rewards from not flogging their players with old-school regularity. "We don't have the same people playing every week, like Wasps did in their pomp and Leicester used to do," he says. "Our rotation policy has definitely helped us keep people fit. As a player I always fell foul of playing a lot of rugby, getting injured around Christmas and not having a long time off to allow my body to repair. Across rugby in general there's more awareness about the importance of protecting your assets. If you look at the size of some of the guys they're crazy big. It's frightening."
So what went wrong last season when Saracens folded against Toulon and Northampton within weeks of each other? It depends to whom you talk.
The England centre Brad Barritt reckons "a bit of complacency" crept in; Saracens, then as now, were hosting the Saints semi-final on their own artificial surface in Hendon which they fondly imagined was virtually impregnable. McCall suspects the Northampton defeat was a hangover from the Toulon disappointment. "We'd just lost the semi-final to Toulon and the sense of what-could-have-been affected us more than we thought."
Morrow feels the untimely injuries which had removed Barritt and Jacques Burger also played a crucial part, while Gustard, interestingly, believes the squad were not as unified as they are now: "We felt we weren't all in synch with each other as much as we could have been. It wasn't like there were massive fractures or disharmony but we weren't quite on the same hymn sheet when it came to the big games. A year on we've learned what it takes to win them. Results have shown we're not too far off the right formula."
The remarkable 46-6 European semi-final win over Clermont Auvergne certainly bears him out. Whether it is the training, the sizeable impact of Billy Vunipola, the maturing of Owen Farrell or the assorted bonding trips to New York, Amsterdam, Verbier and Miami, it is easy to see why Barritt believes the squad are in "a fantastic place". Morrow reckons their work ethic is "as good as I've seen anywhere" and there are few injury headaches.
"Quins do have some momentum but we have huge momentum as well," murmurs McCall, voted the Premiership coach of the season on Thursday. "We've had a good season but we want to go one better than last year. Or, rather, two better." Saracens' season is in effect only just beginning.
