Leinster's frustration, and even fury, over the decision by EPCR to cancel their scheduled Heineken Champions Cup game last Friday night in Montpellier is understandable. Their request for a review of the decision will be heard, perhaps in the coming days, by EPCR's sporting and tournament committee, but their chances of having the gamed re-arranged look remote in the extreme.
Presuming the third and fourth rounds of the pool stages in January are completed with relatively little disruption (quite a leap of faith admittedly) the ramifications of being restricted to a maximum of 15 points are significant.
The four-time winners will have a lower seeding than would have been the case which will affect their chances of acquiring both lucrative and advantageous knock-out ties at the Aviva.
Leinster went through four rounds of PCR tests and five rounds of antigen tests. The travelling squad had all tested negative and Public Health Ireland had granted them permission to travel.
Gerry Thornley: Champions Cup needs fast start as format underwhelms
Gerry Thornley: Signature Munster victory caps spectacular weekend
Gerry Thornley: Munster must keep things in perspective and roll with the punches
Gerry Thornley: Andy Farrell building something special on Joe Schmidt’s Ireland foundations
Yet those rounds of tests also revealed positive results among their wider training squad every day last week up until Thursday, with over 20 believed to have been infected.
By comparison, while Montpellier had a fifth positive cases on the Monday, thereafter they had none.
Ultimately the EPCR decision was based on a recommendation by their match risk assessment committee, which in turn was selected from their overall medical advisory group, a body which draws from the chief medical officers of the leagues and clubs as well as independent medical advisors.
The decision to effectively award Montpellier a walkover against Leinster was in accordance with the rules and regulations
The MRAC which met last Thursday is understood to have comprised seven people, including the IRFU’s CMO Dr Rod McLoughlin. They decided, unanimously, that it was unsafe to proceed with the match and so the EPCR executives notified the Leinster hierarchy that the game would be cancelled and Montpellier awarded a 28-0 win.
Leinster were not amused. Their anger, and that of their supporters, was further irked by the EPCR decision on Friday to postpone, rather than cancel, five Champions Cup games between French and UK teams (as well as two in the Challenge Cup) due to exceptional circumstances, and would seek to have them rescheduled.
Travel restrictions
If all those seven games can be re-arranged, then why not Montpellier-Leinster? It’s a flawed argument. The postponement of the games between Top 14 and UK clubs followed the French government introducing travel restrictions with the UK without exemptions for elite sport.
There is nothing in the EPCR regulations for such an eventuality. What were the organisers to do? If opting to cancel them, then award walkovers? To whom? Most likely they were buying themselves time.
By contrast, the decision to effectively award Montpellier a walkover against Leinster was in accordance with the rules and regulations set out in the participation agreement for the Champions and Challenge Cups. All three leagues and the competing clubs signed up to them.
Yes, recourse to 28-0 wins with a bonus point is a fairly blunt instrument. But it did facilitate last season’s tournament being completed and there weren’t too many tears shed on behalf of Toulon when they actually travelled to Dublin in early April for a last 16 tie which was cancelled and awarded to Leinster.
This was due to a Toulon player testing positive for Covid two days before the game, even though he was put into isolation and remained in France while the remainder of the squad travelled to Dublin, where they subsequently completed all PCR tests without any positive cases.
On the day of the game, the MRAC concluded that there were a number of high-risk contacts with the player who had tested positive and deemed the match unsafe to play with the participation of those identified contacts. For Toulon in April, read Leinster last week.
Where Leinster do have a more legitimate gripe is in drawing comparisons with the round one Wasps-Munster game on the preceding Sunday, which went ahead despite there being several positive Covid cases in Wasps’ ranks up until the day before the game up until their penultimate round of testing two days before the game.
Another round of PCR tests on the Saturday revealed two more positive cases among Wasps players, but neither of them had been close contacts of the playing squad.
Wasps were given approval to play the match by the UK health security agency and the RFU, so the EPCR did not enlist a MRAC to adjudicate on that game.
For the EPCR executives to have ignored their own medical advice last week would have rendered employing them in the first place pointless
This is certainly a very nuanced difference from the circumstances leading up to the Montpellier-Leinster game. The medical risk assessment committee evidently concluded that there was an uncontrolled outbreak of Covid in the wider Leinster squad and hence a risk of further infections.
Normally such a professional organisation, to have such a sustained Covid outbreak over the course of a week (ultimately numbering over 20 apparently) was a very surprising development.
There is some sympathy for Leinster in France, but it remains to be seen if Montpellier are of a mind to have the game re-arranged, which might influence the EPCR’s sporting and tournament committee.
Medical advice
While it would ensure a home ‘gate’, Montpellier do have the backing of the billionaire Mohed Altrad to fall back on. Besides which, not unreasonably, they can claim that the tournament organisers have followed rules and regulations in already awarding the game to them.
But ultimately, for the EPCR executives to have ignored their own medical advice last week would have rendered employing them in the first place pointless. The same would be true if they did an about-turn now.
For sure it seems a little unfair on Leinster, as it must have appeared to Toulon last April. But life is often unfair and so too sport.
Perhaps round two also suffered for its proximity to Christmas, with French and UK clubs fearful of being isolated away from home. Perhaps also, the European competitions were caught in the political post-Brexit crossfire between the French and UK governments.
More worrying still is that the last few days provided further evidence that the French clubs especially and their English counterparts give increasing primacy to their own cherished Top 14 and Premiership, and that the spread of the Omicron variant in England especially has filtered so strongly into rugby and football.
But if rounds three and four in January are damaged as a result, there has to be a will to save the tournament for commercial and TV deals alone. If all else fails they could always a redrawn, straight knock-out competition from April, ie eight last 16 ties with eight byes, leading to quarter-finals a week later and away we go.
