Clermont Auvergne 37-5 Northampton | European Championship Cup match report

• Clermont Auvergne 37-5 Northampton• Read Dan Lucas’s minute-by-minute reportForget Northampton, this felt like a defeat for all of English rugby. England’s champion club, 10 points clear at the head of a Premiership otherwise vibrant in its competitiveness, were subjected to a hammering, pure and simple, so utterly without remorse or ray of sunlight that it is hard not to see it as a slap in the face to anyone who thought English rugby might be on the up.It felt like that in the heat of the moment. A more sobering, boring assessment might be to remind ourselves of this very same Clermont Auv…