A brilliant weekend of Champions Cup action saw an almost clean sweep for English sides and plenty of tense, ‘proper’ European encounters with momentum swinging this way and that in several pools.
Attendances were high as fans flocked to see their favourite players back in action in domestic rugby after the international break. It was all music to the ears of new tournament organisers EPCR.
One of the stated goals of the new tournaments was an increase in how competitive the competitions would be, and if that has been achieved in the Champions Cup – there are three teams still in competition in all pools, and in one any of the four could still qualify – the same cannot be said of its baby sister, the Challenge Cup.
There are four unbeaten sides and in every pool it’s fairly obvious who will be qualifying. While 25,600 were watching a full-blooded Munster vs Clermont affair, a paltry 4,000 went to see Brive take on Oyonnax (to put that in context, Brive average over 12,000 per game in the Top 14). When 22,114 were enjoying the Tigers beating reigning champions Toulon at Welford Road, just 3,212 came to see Edinburgh vs London Welsh – a game played at a stadium that holds 67,800.
To be fair to EPCR, not all blame can be laid at their door – the Amlin Challenge Cup, its previous incarnation, was never particularly loved by supporters, but crucially there was at least the carrot of a place in the Heineken Cup for the winner, if your second string side happened to get you through the pool stages first, of course. When some of the sides from the Heineken Cup dropped down to the knockout stages – a decision not loved by everyone – there were at least some huge clashes that provided entertaining games.
With the aforementioned carrot taken away in favour of an end of season play-off system that merely adds another two weeks of competitive rugby to an already horrendously cluttered calendar, what reason does any club really have to prioritise the Challenge Cup over its domestic league?
The disdain the French clubs have shown for it this season has been laughable. Sure, they were never that interested in the old tournament anyway, but I can’t remember them ever being quite as blunt in their disinterest in the past. Bernard Jackman’s comments last week spoke volumes.
And why not? The money and prestige lies in the Champions Cup, a tournament you can only reach by focussing on your league. So why would you not rest your frontline players in the Challenge Cup so they are fresh to put in a stronger challenge in the league?
This logic, though, is flawed – why does finishing seventh in a league make you more worthy of a place in the top tournament than winning a cup over the course of an entire season? Frankly, it doesn’t. Sure, the Premiership, Top 14 and PRO12 are all competitive leagues but all the play-off system does is make them even more so, whilst taking away any remaining credibility the Challenge Cup had.
If you can’t finish in the top six in your league (or the PRO12’s aggregated version per country), do you deserve a place in the Champions Cup? Arguably not. To put together a winning cup run – even in the Challenge Cup – is surely something that deserves a greater reward.
If there is any hope of the Challenge Cup being a worthwhile tournament, they must bring back qualification for its big brother, the Champions Cup. Without it this season, it has become less competitive, not more. Until that happens, it will remain a damp squib of a tournament, unloved by fans, media and, to be brutally honest, clubs alike.
Astonishingly, Wasps are on track to break the all-time Premiership home attendance record a week on Sunday, a mark currently set at 24,000, the capacity of Welford Road, by Leicester Tigers. They’ve already set a season record with 22,700 tickets sold.
Of course, these numbers have to be taken with a huge pinch of salt. If most clubs offered free entry for under-10s and £15 tickets, they’d probably sell out their stadiums too. Indeed, their opponents this weekend, London Irish, have done similar things in the past and pulled in crowds of 20,000 to the Madejski, but still average around the 7,000 mark this season in the Premiership.
Still, it is a positive start to the Coventry era of the Wasps.
By Jamie Hosie
Follow Jamie on Twitter: @jhosie43
Photo by: Patrick Khachfe / Onside Images
Maybe the challenge cup could find more success in championing young and coming players and give those guys in need of game time some matches. Personally I’ve always loved the lv cup for that
That’ll be the final nail in it. The LV draws paltry crowds and little credible TV coverage since it became a development competition.
In my view they should:
– Reduce the number of games / Simplify the format – Would be better to have less teams but more concerned. So many French Teams in this competition
– Financial impact only for the semi finalist but bigger ones
– Integrate Tier 2/3 national teams if possible
– Reintroduce the Champions Cup qualification for the winner
I think simply the Champions Cup qualification should draw attention to it.
There does need to be an understanding that a second tier comp is inevitably going to be less interesting for fans and inevitably clubs.
There isn’t really a lot else they could do, and other than this, I do much prefer the new format.
Champions Cup Qualification seems to be a given, and I think incorporating other nations would be useful as well. Another thought, surely selling the rights to terrestrial TV for less money but more matches on TV would be another way of drawing more interest to it? It’d certainly be useful for fans who want to see some rugby on terrestrial TV – after all, right now the fact that only one or two matches a weekend in the Challenge Cup are televised is ridiculous – but inevitable when its broadcasters are more interested in the Champions Cup.
Re-introduce awarding the winner a place in the top tier competition and reduce the number of teams to 16 (4 groups) to provide additional incentive to qualify for the knock-out stage and make the tournament more competitive. Remove the two qualifying teams (Bucharest and Rovigo) and the two French teams newly promoted to the Pro14.
The Challenge Cup is a disaster as there is no carrot for the teams in winning the trophy. There has to be qualification for the Champions Cup for the winner. Why they changed it I will never know. As for the Champions cup, when quoting big attendence figures from Munster home games maybe you should mention they are down on previous Heineken Cup attendences. The supporter numbers should all be examined in this context. So far the new format has failed to deliver much excitement. Hopefully the English teams do well with the new competition structure or else we could see it changed again until they do!