Gerry Thornley: Empty seats the abiding memory of opening two rounds of Champions Cup

These are worrying times indeed for the Champions Cup. The abiding and disconcerting memory of the opening two rounds? The amount of games which were played out to a backdrop of far too many empty terraces and seats. The average attendance was 10,563.

In the good days, last night’s welcome 26,500 full house at Thomond Park for their traditional festive derby with Leinster would have been held in stark contrast to the 21,884 for Munster’s opening Champions Cup assignment against five-times champions, and fellow European royalty, Toulouse.

A full house was taken as read for the quarter-finals against the same opponents in 2013 and 2016. Had this opening pool match occurred in those years as something of a grudge match given Toulouse had come through an epic quarter-final via a goal-kicking competition in front of a 40,000-plus crowd the previous May, Thomond Park assuredly would have been packed to the rafters again.

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Yet the attendance was comfortably the biggest for any game in round one, despite the freezing fog and one side of the pitch being increasingly invisible from the other. Next best was La Rochelle’s opening win as reigning champions against Northampton, which was watched by a capacity 16,000. Racing, despite moving their game to Le Havre, and Clermont, were next on the list.

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Despite the widely held perception that the French are only half-interested in Europe, it’s clear that La Rochelle (with a little nudge from Ronan O’Gara) now share the same Champions Cup ambitions as Toulouse, Racing and Clermont, and Toulon will probably be back. It’s also been good to see Edinburgh and Ospreys making competitive starts and winning games.

Altogether more worrying is what is going on in the Eurosceptic land of Brexit. The Premiership has never been at a lower ebb after the demise of Wasps and Worcester, with rumours of at least one more club in serious financial difficulty. The revised weekly schedule is simply sad, with programmes of four or five matches. Even Craig Doyle on BT Sport is struggling to sell that severely damaged product, and the negligible interest of the English broadsheets appears to be waning further.

There wasn’t one attendance of 10,000 for any of the four round one games in the Champions Cup in England. London Irish’s attendance of 5,514 for their first game in the competition in 11 seasons against French champions Montpellier was down on both last season’s average, and this season’s average of 7,702.

Saracens’ attendance on their return to the competition they won three times before their enforced two-year exile was 8,356, about par for their games in Barnet. The crowd of 9,117 at Gloucester’s opening game against Bordeaux/Begles was some way down on last season’s 12,791 average at Kingsholm.

Sale were the only one of the quartet whose attendance of 6,659 was up on last season’s average of 5,948, but that was down to the sizeable Ulster contingent in Salford.

The arrival of the South African teams could prove a success in due course, although as URC viewers have already come to realise, their attendances are lost in vast stadiums – witness the 1,537 for the Lions-Dragons game at the 62,567 capacity Ellis Park in the Challenge Cup. By the way, the attendances in that competition were almost scary.

Admittedly one round is but a snapshot. The aforementioned Premiership quartet are not especially well supported. Leicester welcomed 20,435 for their game against Clermont a week later, which is about on a par with the average attendance at three Premiership games at Welford Road this season.

One of the most damaging aspects of this awful new format is the doing away of the traditional opening rounds in October, so ensuring that this season the tournament was left sucking the hind tit of winter, in a cold snap, amid a cost-of-living crisis, and in the midst of a World Cup.

It was minus four degrees in Brentford when London Irish hosted Montpellier. The Castres-Exeter game clashed with the France-England quarter-final in Al Khor. Northampton-Munster’s endgame overlapped with the start of the final. Some of us were watching Angel di Maria scoring Argentina’s second while interviewing Jeremy Loughman in a cramped little press room at Franklin’s Gardens.

There’s no doubt that the switch from Sky and the opaque tournament format hasn’t helped either. When the EPCR came in swinging they assured us that a reduction from 24 teams to 20 would ensure more quality only (much like reverting to Heineken as main sponsor for a cheaper price rather than the five which were promised) to revert to 24 teams.

[ Gerry Thornley: Ulster’s lose-lose match with La Rochelle in empty Aviva could cost up to €700,000 ]

What’s more they’ve done so in a formula designed to scrap away with one round of fixtures and which is utterly spectator unfriendly – 48 matches to eliminate eight of the 24 teams. So it is that Gloucester can send a second-string team to the RDS knowing they had five points in the bag and will remain in contention.

Leinster’s 57-0 rout perhaps accentuated the disgruntlement with the tournament format in Ireland, not least as that match marked the return of RTÉ for the first televised Irish pool game in 16 seasons.

But given the way George Skivington explained that this was the only way he could rest his frontliners, and was unrepentant, this would probably have happened in round two or four of the old format.

That had its lopsided results too, witness Leicester 62 Treviso 15, Northampton 45 Castres 0, Aironi 0 Clermont 82, Clermont 49 Scarlets 16, Toulon 62 Sale 0, Saracens 46 Clermont 6, Ulster 56 Oyonnax 3, Wasps 51 Leinster 10. And that doesn’t include Toulouse 108 Ebbw Vale 16, and Leinster 92 Bourgoin 17.

The old format was never perfect either, but it was preferable.

The tournament organisers do deserve credit for ensuring that two pan-European competitions were completed during each of the pandemic-affected season, and they couldn’t buy the images from the port of La Rochelle when the team returned with the trophy after beating Leinster in Marseilles the following day.

Heaven knows where the tournament might otherwise be now. That has served to buy the EPCR some time. It was a great tournament under the ERC. It could be again. But do the PRL and the LNR actually give a damn?

gerry.thornley@irishtimes.com