Bath paired with La Rochelle and Scarlets
Bath Rugby have discovered who they will meet in the pool stages of this season’s Heineken Champions Cup.
The draw was made last Wednesday afternoon at Maison du Sport International in Lausanne, Switzerland.
The elite European club competition has been expanded from 20 to 24 teams and will take place over eight weeks rather than the usual nine.
And it has changed quite dramatically with a complicated new format being used.
Bath will play La Rochelle and Scarlets over home and away games in Pool A. The Blue, Black & Whites, who finished fourth in the 2019/20 Gallagher Premiership, will face Ronan O’gara’s TOP 14 La Rochelle and 2016/16 PRO14 Winners Scarlets in four rounds between December 11 and January 22.
For the purposes of the draw, the 24 clubs which qualified from the Premiership, the PRO14 and the TOP 14 were classified into four tiers based on their performances in the knockout phases of their respective leagues, and/or on their qualifying positions in their respective league tables.
Each tier contained six clubs with Tier 1 made up of the number one and number two ranked clubs from each league, and Tier 2, the number three and number four ranked clubs from each league, and so on.
Starting with Tier 1, the clubs were either drawn or allocated into either Pool A or Pool B so that each pool contained 12 clubs with no clubs in the same tier from the same league in the same pool.
The key principles regarding the pool stage fixtures are that clubs will only play against opponents in the same pool, and clubs from the same league cannot play against one another.
The Tier 1 and Tier 4 clubs which were drawn in the same pool, but which are not from the same league, will play one another home and away over four rounds.
The same principle applies to the Tier 2 and Tier 3 clubs which were drawn in the same pool, but which are not from the same league.
The first leg of the quarter-finals will take place during the opening weekend in April, alongside the Challenge Cup round of 16, with the second leg coinciding with the Challenge Cup quarter-finals the following weekend.
The semi-finals of both competitions will be taking place either at the end of April or the first two days in May, with the finals scheduled to take place on May 21 and 22.
TOM de Glanville is likely to be one of 13 Barbarians players that has had charges brought against them by the RFU and will appear before an online independent disciplinary panel chaired by Philip Evans QC after the actions which led to the game against England being postponed.
Whilst the RFU have decided not to name names until after the hearings have been concluded, it had been reported that de Glanville was amongst the players who breached the Covid protocol before the scheduled match.
Currently there is no sanction table applicable to Rule 5.12 and therefore the panel could issue a range of sanctions at their discretion including match fines and/or bans and/or any other suitable sanction.