The European Champions Cup quarter-finals always deliver the best weekend of club rugby of the year.
This season is no exception with brilliant contests across all four matches. What is so heartbreakingly frustrating for all of us who hold this competition in the highest of regards is that it is the first weekend of real meritocracy within the competition. This is because the Champions Cup competition is no longer conducted across an entire season. It has been hacked back into a three-match knockout format.
The English and French clubs have won the war for the soul of our much-loved Heineken Cup and have successfully emasculated the pool-stage games to ensure their weaker clubs are no longer required to succeed across six pool games to reach a playoff stage where the big money presides.
Clubs paying little or no respect to the European competitions is nothing new
The English and French clubs’ goal was to stop the Champions Cup from interrupting the flow of their domestic Top 14 and English Premiership competitions, while still empowering their weaker clubs to generate some cash by reducing the pool matches and inventing the bastardised Round of 16.
Clubs paying little or no respect to the European competitions is nothing new. With fine margins and limited resources, many organisations in the Top 14 and the English Premiership are reluctant to channel their efforts away from survival in their domestic competition to focus on Europe.
Historically, Irish provincial teams have taken the exact opposite stance giving the highest priority to European competitions. This created deep jealousy within the English and French clubs.
Their egos were bruised as the Irish provinces appeared stronger than their domestic best.
Extensive political machinations have actively worked to limit Ireland’s dominance in the competition. To achieve this, during a Covid-affected season, the EPRC [European Professional Club Rugby] acted like a magician pulling a rabbit out of a hat and invented the Round of 16.
What was supposed to be a short-term scheme to generate money during the pandemic has eroded the meritocracy and integrity of the Heineken Cup. All because of greed.
Gloucester, who are third from bottom in the English Premiership, are a prime example of the problem. They won a solitary game in the pool stages. Last December, they arrived in Dublin to play Leinster with little more than a development team leaving the overwhelming majority of their starting team at home.
Swift and unmerciful justice was delivered by Leinster, who, like all Irish clubs, have a long and deeply respectful relationship with European rugby and spanked Gloucester’s bum 57 to zip.
But the current Champions Cup structure is no longer about delivering justice for a season spanning series of high performances.
Now the current competition structure empowers a team like Gloucester, with a winning percentage in the pool stages of just 25 per cent, to have the right to possibly knock out La Rochelle, who had a 100 per cent success rate across their pool games.
Under the former six-pool match system, it usually required five wins or an 83 per cent success rate to reach the playoff stages. Occasionally four wins or a 67 per cent winning record may have scraped a team into the playoffs. A 25 per cent record got coaches dismissed. Now it generates failed clubs huge bucks.
Clubs like Gloucester can now rest players in the pool stages, then place every resource into their single Round of 16 match and be rewarded. Had they won — which they almost did — they would have reached a quarter-final with a 40 per cent winning percentage across the competition.
Travel requirements to play in South Africa desperately disadvantage European-based teams
That is unheard of in any other sporting competition across the world and needless to say disadvantages the Irish provinces.
As Munster discovered last weekend, not only does the Round of 16 mean that European rugby is no longer a meritocracy, the introduction of the South African teams means that the travel requirements to play in South Africa desperately disadvantage European-based teams.
When the URC and the EPRC announced that South African teams would be joining the competition, those of us with the Super Rugby experience of competing in South Africa wondered if the administrators had skipped Geography 101 for lessons in the recent Silicon Valley Bank story.
The chairman of the USA Senate Banking Committee investigating the recent failure of the Silicon Valley Bank is Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown. Last week he told the committee that the root cause of the failure of the bank lies in the “hubris, entitlement and greed” displayed by the Banks executives who guided their highly unwise investment strategies.
The fact that Cape Town is in a different hemisphere and 13,700km from Dublin means that when it is cold and wet in the north, it is steaming hot and humid in South Africa. When the flight time of 11 hours is added to transfers and clearing customs this means it is a minimum of 15 hours of travel one way.
Administrators who have condemned athletes in our body-contact sport to a 30-hour round trip and expect them to be able to compete on an equal basis in the heat of another hemisphere have no concept of high-performance sport.
The short-term results that will be pointed out by the current administration are that the crowds at last week’s matches were high
All of these strategies that have been adopted by EPRC are full of hubris, entitlement and greed.
The short-term results that will be pointed out by the current administration are that the crowds at last week’s matches were high and the income generated from the exposure of eight games on TV was significant.
Down Under, Super Rugby, which once dominated the global club scene, had poor crowd numbers, with four of the Australian teams sitting in the bottom five positions on the competition table. It is a New Zealand-dominated competition that has lost the public’s imagination.
Hubris, entitlement and greed displayed by past administrators in Super Rugby have created this scenario. The Heineken Champions Cup seems to have committed to treading down the same path.
