Champions Cup has lost its winning formula

The Champions Cup cheerleaders were at it again last weekend, united parrot-fashion in their acclamation of ‘rugby’s greatest knockout club tournament’. Removing the aforesaid statement from the realm of fake news requires nothing more than three words of plain English: used to be. Renowned and revered as the

Heineken Cup, it USED TO BE the greatest knock-out club tournament, so great at times that it dared to upstage the Six Nations.

consequent interference with the domestic business of the Prem? The same question has to be asked of Cardiff, once upon a time long ago able to justify their self-styled title as ‘The Greatest’. runners-up into the quarter-finals – they would have run a grave risk of being knocked-out. Instead of leaving well alone when they inherited the old system, the clubs tinkered with a winning By copying Champions League football, EPCR as in European Professional Club Rugby saw it as an extra round deisgned to make more money from a fattened television deal. Instead it has depreciated, reture backed by the Welsh regions, would supposedly leave them all rolling in money. Why? Because Premier Rugby in England and the LNR in France believed they had a superior brand

Look at it now. An opening weekend, launched at Kingsholm with Gloucester‘s humdinger of a draw against holders Bordeaux, exposed further flaws which took some doing given that so many had already been exposed.

Never mind, the television commentators would reassure viewers they were watching the greatest club tournament: so great that Bristol Bears tackled their opening match against the Stormers last Saturday by deciding they would rather be anywhere else than in Cape Town.

So they made sure the first team 23 put their 46 feet up at home and sent a youthful mixture of second, third and fourth-choice players off on a lost cause. In doing so, they ruined the match as a contest, took a 7-2 pasting on tries and left another bruise on the credibility of the competition.

It also raises an awkward rhetorical question: What’s the point of busting a gut all season long to qualify for the big event only to get there and decide it’s not worth the

Sunday afternoon at Franklin’s Gardens presented a heaven-sent invitation to slay Northampton, a giant-killing of sorts against opponents raising the art of try-scoring to stratospheric heights.

Instead of rubbing their hands at the challenge of taking the Saints on at their own game, Cardiff bemoaned the fact that the schedule left them only five days to prepare for Friday night’s home match against the Sharks from Durban.

A routine fixture in the URC sounded as though it mattered more than a crack at the champions of England. Northampton could afford to rest a few, their opponents less so. Had Cardiff shown more ambition and gone full-bore, who knows the Saints might have struggled to register the Prem’s only win of the weekend.

The Bears can afford to write one match off and still survive in Europe. Under the old format as perfected when the Unions ran the show – six pools of four teams, six matches home and away, six winners and two highest-placed formula until they destroyed it. Now nobody plays each other home and away, three-quarters of the 24 starters qualify for the knock-out stage and the tedious Round of 16.

portedly by as much as 50 per cent.

The rot can be traced back to the clubs wrestling control of the event from the national Unions in 2014. The take-over, an Anglo-French ven-

of collective commercial clout to outmuscle the Unions and attract millions more in sponsorship. They failed, miserably.

As Bath‘s owner Bruce Craig confessed to The Guardian’s Rob Kitson, ‘the big error’ was trying to emulate the Champions’ League policy of multi-sponsorship deals. He admitted to other errors over the format: “I just think it’s lost something. Where it is now is not doing it for anyone.”

It lost a whole lot more than something and yet the clubs, regions and provinces who form EPCR, have allowed the deterioration of a neglected event to continue. The first step towards arresting its decline would ensure restoration of the home-and-away pool matches.

More often than not, they generated a magic of their own, never more so than on Sunday January 11, 2004 when Ulster routed Leicester, Martin Johnson et al, 33-0 beneath a blue sky at Ravenhill. Six days later, at Welford Road, the Tigers got their own back, 49-7.