New season, new format for European tournament
SUCH are the strange times that we live in that next season’s European Champions Cup will get underway on December 11, barely six weeks after ‘this season’s’ tournament is concluded.
And for this one season there is an ad hoc format which sees the number of teams expand to 24 but the weekends required for matches drop from nine to eight.
In a major development it will feature home and away quarter-finals which is something EPRC have considered in the past, preCovid, while the venue for the finals of both the Champions Cup and Challenge Cup is confirmed as Marseilles which missed out this year as the pandemic took hold.
The new format will put a huge strain on clubs contributing significant numbers of players to the Autumn International tournament and rearranged Six Nations games as most of them will be required to stand down for a couple of games. Rob Baxter is one top coach who has already warned that some of his top men will be forced to miss some European matches.
“The way it drops in immediately post-international blocks is tough,” says Baxter. “You’re only just going to get your players back from the block of internationals. If they are going to play the next weekend it’s in your first European game.”
The 2020-21 format divides the 24 teams into two pools of 12. Each of those pools will then be further divided into four sub pools of three teams who will play each other home and away.
When that is done the four top teams in each ‘larger’ pool – calculated by the normal methods of league points, points difference tries etc – will be seeded and progress into the quarter-finals in the usual way.
For all this to happen the top eight teams in each of the three domestic leagues – Premiership, Top 14 and PRO14 – are calculated according to where they finished in those leagues. That was easy enough with the Top 14 which closed down after Round 17 on March 1. The league positions then provide their rankings. The regular season of the PRO14 came to a halt on March 6 after the final R13 game and the positions then of the top four of the two conferences has been used to calculate the top eight.
With the PRO14 there was the complication that Cheetahs – fourth in Conference A – are ineligible so that lets in the Dragons. None of which will please Benetton who were in fifth place in Conference B with 12 more league points than Dragons. Indeed sixthplaced Cardiff have nine more league points than Dragons.
The final positions in the Premiership will be determined when the regular season concludes after Round 22.
Having determined the 24 teams, a seeded draw process then takes place to determine the pools. Based on their positions in the domestic league, each team will be deemed either Tier 1, 2, 3 or 4. Rugby does like its Tiers and labelling sides!
A Tier 1 team will be those who finished first or second in their domestic league. They will play pool games only against those in Tier 4, who finished seventh and eighth in their leagues. Tier 2 sides, those who finish third and fourth in leagues, will only play Tier 3 clubs, those who finish fifth and sixth in leagues. No side will play another from its own league.
The luck of the draw, it would seem, is no longer a concept that rugby really wants to entertain and the cynic might consider the ‘draw’ is designed mainly to provide eight of the top clubs with the biggest pay days possible for their home and away quarterfinals.
Eight ‘quarter-finals’ will also delight the broadcasters who, let’s be honest, are keeping the game’s head above water at present.
Happily, though, there are some anomalies that might shake things up a little and make the tournament seem a little less preordained and structured, not least in France where Toulouse and Montpellier were languishing in seventh and eighth places and could prove mighty awkward opposition to T1 teams.