High time new Cup lived up to the hype
EUROPEAN club rugby is back and the stark reality is that the new Champions Cup — now in its third season — is still searching for identity and gravitas.
So far, something has been missing. The old Heineken Cup provided annual drama, fascinating tribalism and variety, before the status quo was shattered by an uprising instigated by clubs from the powerful Top 14 in France and Aviva Premiership in England.
The upshot has been greater meritocracy, but also monotony. The continent’s blue-riband event has become an Anglo-French competition with a few invited guests from outside those borders.
Predictability has often chased surprise and suspense out of town.
There have still beenn titanic encounters, twist and turns — not least when Exeter snuck into the quarter-finals last season courtesy of a freak combination of results. But the mood of English wellbeing, when the Premiership provided three teams inn the last four, was under-ermined by a nagging sense that all was not well.
Paul O’Connell addressed the subject this week, with the insight and passion of a former Munster captain who won the old trophy twice.
‘It’s not quite the same,’ he said. ‘There are semi-finals being played in stadiums that aren’t full. There is something less exciting about it.’
What is needed this year is for odds to be upset and for pools to go to the wire. It needs the Italian side, Zebre, to punch above their weight and prevent crude mismatches.
It needs less-fancied teams such as Connacht, Sale and the Scarlets to rise to so mmany big occasions and lower the colours of heavyweight clubs. It needs people to sense that high drama is back on the agenda and defy ludicrous, made-for-TV kick- off times to fill stadiums and provide a vivid backdrop.
It needs Leinster and Ulster to mount a compelling, two-pronged Irish assault again, generating intrigue and fresh variety. And it needs all the French sides to fight tooth and nail to the last, if they can qualify or not.
The leading forces — Saracens, Clermont, Toulon and Wasps among them — will lay on a grand show, but others must join them. With the final to be staged in Scotland, the organisers’ dream would be for Glasgow to last the course.
While that may be too fanciful a wish, they will settle for the elite cartel who have held an iron grip in recent years to be smashed, so that the Champions Cup can start truly catching the imagination, in the way of its cherished predecessor.