Gerry Thornley: Home advantage makes all the difference in URC and Top 14 games

When Munster roared into a 14-3 lead in the first quarter at the Kingspan Stadium on Friday night, the odds favoured them extending their unbeaten start to the season. Yet, roared on by their home crowd, Ulster ground their way back into the match as Munster have done so often to them at Thomond Park, the wily Rob Herring closing the door in the game’s last play.

It had been a similar story the week before in the Sportsground, when Connacht trailed 20-3 against Ulster after a near-perfect smash-and-grab away performance for 45 minutes, before three tries completed the comeback.

So far in the teething stages of the 2023-24 URC, the Irish provinces have played nine games at home and won them all.

As for Connacht, after drawing level in Edinburgh, when they failed to secure the restart or exit from a scrum on their own 22, you sense the endgame was almost inevitable and so it came to pass that Ben Healy neatly clipped the match-winning drop goal with the last action of the match. We’ll never know, but it might have been the other way around at a raucous Sportsground.

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True, there were four away wins over the weekend and although Leinster have had their troubles in Newport over the years, they were strong favourites to beat the Dragons. For Dan Sheehan to re-set his sights on a URC game against the Dragons at a rain-lashed Rodney Parade four weeks after playing against the All Blacks in a World Cup quarter-final in Paris was some adjustment.

He led from the front, and having opened the scoring produced probably the play of round four when latching onto a loose ball inside his own half to offload in the tackle, and better still bounced to his feet to race upfield in a wide arc to the right touchline. One ruck later, he supported Ciaran Frawley on the inside before giving the try-scoring assist. Hats off.

However, even Zebre found a way to beat the Sharks at home last Friday night by 12-10 to claim their first win in 29 matches. The advent of the South African franchises has, you’d have thought, increased the ratio of home wins in the competition; the additional travel and climactic demands compounding the usual factors at work.

In the last season which was neither affected by Covid nor included South African sides, the 2016-17 Pro12, the ratio of home wins was almost 61 per cent compared to almost 39 per cent away wins, albeit this was thanks in the main to Leinster (who won 11 out of 11 at home), the Scarlets (10-0-1), Ulster (9-1-1), Munster and the Ospreys (both 9-0-2).

Yet last season, the ratios were almost identical, with 89 wins equating to 62 per cent in the regular season, while there were 51 away victories, or just over 35 per cent. Admittedly, five of the knock-out matches were won by the away side, which makes Munster’s achievement in beating Glasgow, Leinster and the Stormers on the road to claim the title all the more commendable.

This season, the ratio of home wins in the URC is almost 66%, but these are early days yet and the figures are perhaps distorted by the South Africans having been on the road.

Even then, the percentages remain some way shy of the Top 14, where away day travails have been a source of huge irritation to non-French players and coaches. Trevor Brennan once read the riot act to his Toulouse teammates and back in 2017, Sergio Parisse sighed wearily: “I have played in France since 2005 and I still don’t understand why matches away are played like this.

“Players live differently in away matches. The week before at home they were like Lions. Away they are like mice! I don’t know why but I don’t win too many matches away with Stade Francais since I have been there.”

At the time, home teams in the Top14 were winning a staggering 74 per cent of their home games – over 11 per cent more than any other rugby league in the world.

Plus ça change. Last season, that ratio reached 75 per cent and in the opening six rounds of the Top 14 this season there have been 36 wins out of 42 matches, equating to almost 86 per cent.

It drove Ronan O’Gara nuts too and not the least dramatic effect he has on La Rochelle is their radically changed away-day mindset – recovering from Leinster’s early onslaught to win last May’s Champions Cup final being the classic case in point, and utterly unimaginable until not so long ago.

Speaking of which, by comparison the number of home wins two seasons ago in the Champions Cup was just shy of 60 per cent, while last season it reached 62.5 per cent, with 35.4 per cent away victories. That said, all eight home sides advanced from the last 16, as did all four home quarter-finalists.

Along the way, such was the dramatic effect of the pandemic and the ensuing absence of fans that in the Covid-affected 2020-21 Pro14 season, away wins actually outnumbered home wins by 49 to 48. Similarly, away wins outnumbered home victories in the Six Nations games without supporters in 2020 and 2021.

Indeed, far more exhaustive and detailed studies than this one demonstrated that in the echo chambers across manifold football and rugby competitions around Europe, showed that without fans home advantage was simply eradicated.

The bigger the crowd, the more partisan the support, the more likely the home team is to win, not only because home sides are inspired by the nose and support levels that come with playing in front of family and friends, but also because they influence the officiating of referees, who are themselves only human.

As an aside, rare is the sporting occasion where there is the kind of equal partisanship that one witnessed at the Aviva Stadium last Sunday for that record-breaking attendance at St Patrick’s FAI Cup final win over Bohemians.

But aside from finals at neutral venues with evenly matched supporting numbers, it would appear that normal service has been resumed – and as forcibly as ever.