Investec Champions Cup organisers should meddle with knockouts
On Wednesday the amount of tickets still available for Harlequins’ Investec Champions Cup round of 16 fixture against Sale Sharks was well over 6,000.
Against their registered capacity of 14,800, that could result in an attendance of less than 9,000 – or around 40 per cent empty – come Saturday night.
It is a better sight over at Bath’s Recreation Ground, which looks to be a sell-out. But for Northampton Saints, at home to Castres on Friday night, there are hundreds of tickets remaining.
It’s not really their fault either.
The Champions Cup has undoubtedly lost a little bit of its aura, but there is an easy fix: better timings and a re-jig of who plays who.
Status quo?
At the moment four pools of six teams sees the top four from each group progress through to the round of 16, where they are then seeded based on the number of points they picked up on the way.
Seed one plays 16, two takes on 15 and so on. I will leave it to others to argue whether the pool system, and generous qualification odds, are the way forward.
But the tournament organisers, European Professional Club Rugby, should allow themselves to tinker with the seeds to ensure teams in the same league avoid each other in the round of 16.
Four of the eight fixtures this weekend feature two teams in the same league: Bath Rugby versus Saracens, Harlequins versus Sale Sharks, Leinster versus Edinburgh and Glasgow Warriors versus Vodacom Bulls.
Sure, the timing is difficult – there are issues with the Tube and it is Easter weekend – but playing a team in Sale Sharks who Quins face again in the Prem later this month definitely doesn’t help.
To spice it up, they should really be playing a team from the French Top 14 or the multi-national United Rugby Championship.
It would be unfair to tinker with the tournament right until the semi-finals or final – after all, two of the four quarter-finals are likely to see match-ups featuring teams from the same league – but a little bit of manoeuvring could help to avoid games already part of a team’s season repeated in Europe.
Champions Cup re-jig
Bath’s all-English fixture comes just weeks after they beat the same opponents, Saracens, 62-15 in the league.
No matter the result, it is hard to deny that Toulouse’s match against Bristol or Bordeaux’s versus Leicester are much more exciting because those sides don’t play each other very often, if at all.
The Champions Cup is still special, and it offers the je ne sais quoi that domestic rugby can sometimes lack.
But we should encourage the cross-border contests, even if that means moving the needle on the precise rules and regulations on seeding. It keeps it interesting and that should trump the rest of it.
For the record, I cannot see past eight home wins this weekend – which is a shame, and predictable, because a fiver on an eight-fold accumulator returns just £16. Not worth it.
Former England Sevens captain Ollie Phillips is the founder of Optimist Performance. Follow Ollie @OlliePhillips11