Two weeks before the return of European rugby, the favourites to reach the final, Toulouse and Leinster, were narrowly defeated in their domestic competitions.
An unrecognisable Toulouse team that contained none of their internationals, as well as two 19-year-old rookies, fought with surprising cohesion to threaten Bordeaux. In contrast, their closest rivals in the Top 14 selected their big guns, including Maxime Lucu, Damian Penaud and Louis Bielle-Biarrey.
While Bordeaux got the points and the money, as it was a 42,000 sellout at Stade Matmut Atlantique, it was Toulouse who claimed the moral victory. The narrow margin of their 32-24 defeat was like Les Noir et Rouge doing a Muhammad Ali and whispering into the ears of the Bègles-Bordeaux players during the clinches, “Is that all you got? You ain’t so bad.”
Have the Lions left Ireland in the lurch?
While in South Africa, in a similar scenario, Leinster without their Irish players and playing at altitude at Loftus Versfeld, one of world rugby’s toughest away stadiums, fell to the Bulls after a scrum penalty in the 83rd minute.
Despite Leinster scoring some brilliant tries it was another match where scrum penalties determined the ultimate winner. As the definition of a scrum is to restart play after a minor infringement, it is another in a marathon-long line of examples of how rugby’s outdated scrum laws are wrongly empowering teams to gain match-winning penalties.
Scrums and maul defence cost Leinster the game. With an entire pack to return, there is no need for some of the panicked talk that followed another close defeat.
At home La Rochelle scraped a 12-12 draw against a plucky Castres. Now in eighth position on the Top 14 table and struggling to find form, La Rochelle sit deep in a cluster of teams that are only a defeat away from dropping out of contention.
After the Munster faithful’s fanatical support of La Rochelle in recent Champions Cup playoffs, next week it will be interesting to see which jersey the Red Army will pull on at Stade Marcel-Deflandre.
There is no doubt that a full-strength Munster have more than a good shot at upsetting Les Rochelais.
However, every season at this time of year we have to ask the question, how are teams such as Ulster and Sale, with a 25 per cent winning record across the pool stages of the Champions Cup, allowed to participate in the knockout stages?
The absence of a meritocracy in the round of 16 depletes rugby as a sport and has greatly diminished the stature of the Champions Cup. However, the Round of 16 is not the only ethical stain on professional rugby’s soul.
The newly conceived World Rugby Nations Championship, which will commence next year, is a competition between the world’s top 12 nations, with the final to be played in late November. All of which is a highly positive step.
It was proposed that the final be played in the capital of Qatar, Doha. This possibility shocked and dismayed much of the wider rugby community. Despite this resistance, reports have suggested that the possibility of a Doha final was only narrowly defeated by a solitary vote.
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There appears little doubt that many in rugby’s leadership have lost the moral compass that provided the sport with its unique culture for so long.
This raises the same question Roman writer Juvenal asked two thousand years ago: “Who watches the watchmen?”
Factions within the stewardship of the game are battling over maintaining the ethos of rugby or selling out for the money.
In many cases, the “sellouts” are winning. While the move to play in Doha was closely defeated, I suggest you watch this space in the future.
In the Champions Cup, the round of 16, which we were told at the time was created for a single season because of the pandemic, has sold out the most basic of all sporting principles - which is that you have to win games to compete for a trophy.
This season, a 25 per cent winning record gets a professional rugby team a shot at winning the Champions Cup.
In the eyes of those in stewardship of the Champions Cup the eight games in the round of 16, which make a lot of money, justifies the dismantling of rugby’s meritocracy. As Tolstoy said, “Wrong does not cease to be wrong because the majority share in it.”
In these decisions I believe we are seeing the effects of allowing private equity to own part of the decision-making process of the professional game. Investment requires a return.
I would advise the private equity investors to consider that rugby is not Formula One. Rugby does not have fans. Rugby has a community that is highly educated in the game. The majority have either played or have a close relationship with someone who did. Which is the polar opposite of Formula One.
Rugby people are not fools.
Super Rugby, which once dominated the global club game, lost its moral compass and treated its rugby community as a commodity. Their community of educated rugby people, who had supported the game for so long, walked away.
Knowing your market is the first principle of selling, and the private equity investors need to quickly realise that by making decisions that alienate their educated community, their investment could follow the trend of Super Rugby and evaporate.
Every educated rugby person fully appreciates the round of 16 and playing the final of huge international tournaments in Qatar is a complete crock of bulls**t.
The investors would be far more astute if they placed unbearable pressure on World Rugby to change many of the current outmoded laws to produce rugby matches with increased ball-in-play time, fewer penalties, scrums and mauls, and encourage more expansive running rugby.
Attacking, high-quality, aggressive rugby is a sensational sporting product that will sell to a global audience.
Instead of the short-sighted actions that dilute the uniqueness of the game, which will see the rugby community walk away, rugby’s private equity investors should use their influence to produce a higher-quality and more valuable version of the product they already partly own.
