Streamline Champions Cup - don’t just dilute it
What bright spark invented this game of ours? The creation myth tells us it was a hoity-toity public schoolboy with a cavalier disregard for the rules. (No, not THAT one). New Zealanders, on the other hand, deify Dave Gallaher, visionary captain of the 1905 “Originals”, as the motivating spirit behind the sport we now call Rugby Union.
Or maybe its first stirrings were in ancient Phrygia, with the bloke responsible for tying the Gordian Knot: a persuasive theory when you consider that the whole of rugby, from the definition of the humble forward pass to the grand debate over global season structure, has its knickers in a twist that resists all attempts at disentanglement. God, it’s complicated.
The format of the European Champions Cup, so named even though the South Africans are about to smash their way into it like Bakkies Botha arriving at a ruck, may be the most bamboozling aspect of the lot. Somehow, we have derived almost 30 years of joy from a tournament that has rarely located the very best of itself and settled there because rival agendas have denied it the luxury.
We’ve seen a 12-team, four-pool launch; a 20-team, four-pool set-up; a 20-team, five-pool arrangement with play-offs for the quarter-finals; a long run of 24-team, six-pool competitions; a 20-team, five-pool format with no play-offs for the quarter-final; a Coviddriven 24-team, two-group system with a sudden-death round of 16; and, this season, a pandemic-adjusted 24-team, two-group, round-of-16 fandango with home-and-away fixtures to decide the last eight. Phew. Glad that’s over.
As for second-tier event…let’s not go there. Please. Italian governments change less often than the Challenge Cup.
Next season will be different once again, thanks to the arrival of the Springbok hordes and, at this distance, the signs are not entirely propitious. As Nick Cain argued with force in last week’s paper, accommodating the top eight finishers from each of Europe’s three professional leagues will inevitably have a “watering down” effect.
Now, the game is no stranger to temperance techniques when it comes to clubhouse beer: there is so much gnat’s pee consumed after matches, you wonder whether all bar managers are practising Methodists. But dilution is hardly appropriate for the “elite, pre-eminent, best of the best, crème de la crème” Champions Cup, which, by definition, should always be strong enough to knock us off our feet.
It would be far better, surely, to give this brilliant tournament its full percentage proof by choosing quality over quantity and rejecting growth in favour of exclusivity.
How’s this for a revamp: a 16-team competition, consisting of the top four
“This is top-end professional sport we’re dealing with here, not social services
finishers – or, if you prefer, the semifinalists – in the Premiership, the Top 14 and the United Rugby Championship, together with BOTH finalists from the previous season’s Champions Cup AND, crucially, the Challenge Cup?
What could be simpler? What could be better? Every match in the four pools of four would be off-the-scale competitive, and by doubling the incentivisation of the Challenge Cup (which would, under this system, boast some extremely strong clubs from the get-go), there might even be a chance of some meaningful sponsorship.
Look at it through the prism of now. The top four in the Premiership as things stood before this weekend’s games were Leicester, Saracens, Harlequins and Exeter. Pretty good. In
France, it was Montpellier, Bordeaux, La Rochelle and Castres; in the URC, we had Leinster, Ulster, Glasgow and Munster. Throw in Toulouse, the Champions Cup holders, and Racing 92 (who would qualify as the next French club in line because of Montpellier’s victory in the 2021 Challenge Cup), plus Lyon and Northampton (included via the same countback route) and you have quite the stellar line-up.
In reality, of course, one or more of the South African sides would find a way in. And if you’re worried about the disappearance of the Welsh, you might care to ask yourself why and answer honestly. They’re not good enough, basically, and haven’t been for ages, any more than the Italians have been up to snuff. This is top-end professional sport we’re dealing with here, not social services.
Agreed, the model does not tick every box. It could not accommodate a round of 16 – a life-saver during the pandemic – because there are only 16 teams to start with, and going forward, there would be every possibility of reducing “net zero” to “ground zero” by sending, say, an Irish team all the way to Pretoria for 80 minutes of knock-out rugby and then flying them back home again. Even the Munster supporters would think twice about making such a trip.
But doing nothing is not an option, to borrow the political catchphrase of the moment. With 43 teams now in the European mix – thanks to the Premiership and its self-serving instincts, we now have an odd number making our brains ache even more than usual – it is patently ridiculous to have more than half of them in a tournament that prides itself on its own “pre-eminence”.
Soon enough, it will be more difficult NOT to qualify for the top competition. Which, as we know, is the very opposite of the meritocracy everyone claims to want.