That was the weekend that was, and the weekend which crystallised the waning appeal of the Champions Cup. Tinkering with the format hasn’t generated an upturn and there seem to be more and more foregone conclusions in the pool stages which no longer possess the jeopardy and dramatic final weekends that was once one of the tournament’s hallmarks.
Maybe it’s too small a sample size, but even the opening two rounds last season were sprinkled with competitive, closely fought games. Consider this, in those opening two rounds, there were 11 one-score games, whereas in the opening two rounds this season, there have only been four one-score games.
As Toulouse run up 60-plus points in successive weeks, so anything less than this by Leinster is interpreted by Leo Cullen, the players, their supporters and the media as a relative failure.
Leinster are damned if they do, and damned if they don’t – namely win their pool games with bonus points gift-wrapped long before the end either side of Christmas. If they do, well, it doesn’t matter until they reach the final. If they don’t, well, they’re on the slide.
Such entitlement is understandable to some degree. Leinster have won their last 24 pool matches on the field of play (a walkover against Montpellier in 2020-21 doesn’t count) dating all the way back to a 28-27 defeat in Toulouse in October 2018, and all but five of them have been garnished with an offensive bonus point.
Last Saturday’s 15-7 win over Clermont was Leinster’s 21st successive home victory in the Champions Cup pool stages dating back to their annus horribilis of 2015-16 when beaten by Toulon at the Aviva. It was the first time since a 22-17 win over Exeter in December 2017 at the Aviva that Leinster didn’t varnish a home win with a bonus point – a run of 15 games.
But not even Leinster are entitled to win every home pool game with a bonus point and, besides, we can’t have it every way.
Is the Champions Cup on its last legs?
At a time when those foregone conclusions have become all too commonplace, and so many teams have thrown their hat at games (not least when playing Leinster in Dublin) Clermont should be saluted for fronting up with, more or less, a full-strength side and making it a properly competitive match. Christophe Urios is a passionate coach and along with the remarkable Fritz Lee had his side well-prepared and well-pumped up.
Similarly, Northampton did the tournament a favour by sending a full-strength side all the way to Pretoria and beating the Bulls in Loftus Versfeld.
But the inclusion of the South African sides is not working. One-off long haul treks to Europe or vice versa are not wanted by anyone. Thus, shadow Stormers and Sharks sides each conceded over a half-century of points away to Harlequins and Leicester.
Even the Stormers head coach John Dobson admits that the performances of the South African sides was not a good look for them or the tournament and requires urgent addressing. But with the South Africans to become full shareholders in EPCR, this horse has bolted and it’s hard to conjure a solution.
The kernel of the problem foisted upon the Champions Cup is the insistence of the French clubs to effectively prioritise their Top 14 – which requires a whopping 29 weekends to complete – over the Champions Cup. Hence instead of the long-established nine weekends, for the last three seasons there have only been eight weekends set aside. Nor are the French remotely inclined to back down.
What’s more, the English clubs, in their delusions of grandeur, have supported this stance even though as the Premiership has been reduced to a 10-club, 18-game regular season format, you’d have thought they could do with the return of a six-game pool format and with it the guarantee of another home game.
The current, hotch-potch format consisting of four pools of six teams is an improvement on the mind-boggling two pools of 12 that existed for the two seasons beforehand and was, admittedly, a resourceful response to the pandemic. But it is still unfriendly to supporters and removes much of the jeopardy that used to exist in the pool stages.
The Castres head coach Jeremy Davidson openly admitted last week that targeting two home wins could ensure advancement to the knock-out stages. In fact, based on last season, two wins would suffice, while Munster advanced with one win, a draw and two defeats, and Racing 92 did so with one win and three defeats.
That is plainly daft, albeit winning all four pool games is significant as earning home advantage in the knock-out stages has been an enormously important factor. Of the 19 ties where a team has had home, or home country, advantage there have only been three away wins, and all of them, by a solitary point.
La Rochelle beat Leinster by 27-26 in the Aviva final two seasons ago and the Stormers in the round of 16 by 22-21 last season, while Harlequins beat Bordeaux Bègles 42-41 in their epic quarter-final.
Overall though, the tournament has lost its balance. Where before, with six pools of four, there were 72 games to eliminate 12, or half, of the teams, now there are 48 games to whittle the tournament down by just eight, or a third.
It has also lost the home-and-away return fixtures that generate rivalries. Imagine if Leinster had still to go to Clermont, for example. It also seems utterly daft that La Rochelle host Leinster for the second season running in rematches of the preceding two finals without there being a return clash in Dublin.
Most of all, in addition to having the knock-out stages run off with undue haste in deference to the “domestic” competitions at the end of the season, the Champions Cup has lost its slot in October. Now it lands in December for a couple of rounds, and resurfaces again in January, as if being shoehorned into the season as an inconvenience. And the Champions Cup should be better than that. It used to be, after all.
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