Ban teams who pick reserves for knock-out stages
THE Bulls are not the first outfit to undermine the European Cup by picking an understrength team, with some French clubs – Bourgoin in particular – taking that route in the past. Bayonne also did the same this season in the pool phase against Northampton.
However, it is hard to recall any team that has earned a quarter-final place in the best club tournament in the world fielding a reserve line-up like the Bulls did against Northampton at Franklin’s Gardens last weekend.
Jake White is a World Cup-winning coach who is turning the Bulls back into a formidable force, but, even allowing for crippling airline costs and route/schedule convolutions, the decision to virtually concede the chance of a semi-final was a serious error.
The suggestion that injuries contributed to the Bulls team being depleted were shown to be bogus when White announced a starting side to play against Munster in the URC yesterday in Pretoria, which included the seven Springboks he left out of the side hammered 59-22 by the Saints.
Those who were pulled out of the nine try defeat were box-office world champion backs like Kurt-Lee Arendse, Willie Le Roux, and new shooting star Canan Moodie, as well as Embrose Papier, Johan Goosen, Wilco Louw, and Elrigh Louw.
The EPCR response so far has been the soft option of trying to persuade the Premiership, Top 14, and URC to allow a bigger gap than a week between the Round of 16 and the quarter-finals. The best solution is to scrap the half-baked Round of 16 and revert to the homeand-away pool format of the halcyon years, as outlined in this column last week.
However, irrespective of the format permutations, what the Bulls did cannot be airbrushed away.
While the Bulls got their just deserts on the playing field, the devaluation of the European Cup’s status merits a public warning. EPCR should stipulate that any repetition of picking a reserve team for a knock-out game will see the Bulls – or any team that takes the same path – ejected from the tournament for two years.