Gerry Thornley: Champions Cup home-and-away legs are much fairer

Rugby, like any sport, should never be hostages to tradition. By the same token, some traditions are often worth keeping. If it ain’t broke, why fix it? It can be a difficult balancing act, and not just for rugby.

Take the European Champions League in football. Since the 2009-10 season they have had a format which both works and is easily understood by football supporters; 32 teams divided into eight round-robin groups of four, with the top two in each group advancing to the last 16. Cue the two-legged rounds until the one-off final.

It would have been a great formula for the Heineken Champions Cup had it not been for the primacy of the domestic competitions among English and French club owners.

Yet from the 2024/25 season the Champions League group stage will expand from 32 to 36 teams, who will play in a single league format. Instead of the current six matches, each team will play a minimum of 10 games against 10 different opponents.

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The top eight teams will advance automatically to the Round of 16, those sides placed between ninth and 24th will enter a playoff round, to earn the remaining places in the Round of 16. It is clearly designed to generate more money and stave off the threat of the European Super League, but it seems overly complicated and will lead to even more dead rubbers. But, hey, maybe it will work better than it looks from this remove.

Meanwhile, back in rugby, the same vested English and French interests which overthrew the old ERC organising body to replace it with the Swiss-based EPCR has failed abysmally to achieve its grand designs, specifically an amalgam of sponsors.

They also reduced the number of participating clubs from 24 to 20, so ending 15 seasons of a format in which there were six round-robin groups of four with the half dozen pool winners joined by the two best-placed runners-up.

Instead, we had six seasons in which there were five groups of four, with pool winners and three best second-placed sides advancing to the quarter-finals. Whereupon this was changed again last season to two groups of 12 clubs, which at least expanded the number of participants to 24 again, begging the question whatever happened to their “less is more” theory?

The pandemic disrupted last season’s Heineken Champions Cup and European Challenge Cup, and it was to EPCR’s huge credit that they completed both tournaments. One of the pandemic-induced changes was a two-legged Round of 16, which was then scuppered and turned into straight, knock-out ties due to Covid-19.

So EPCR resolved to try the two-legged Round of 16 format this season, the reaction to which appears mostly negative or lukewarm. In these pages Matt Williams went so far as to say this "bastardised" Round of 16 has "damaged the integrity" of the competition and was motivated solely by financial greed.

Yet if it does succeed in generating more badly needed income for the 16 qualifiers over the course of last weekend and next, then in the fallout from the pandemic that is fair enough.

It’s worth having an open mind about too.

While there was a fear that it might lead to glorified dead rubbers next weekend, only three ties look done and dusted

There had always been a compelling case for making the semi-finals two-legged affairs rather the unfair lottery of home advantage being decided by the luck of the draw. Even merit-based home advantage in the last eight and last four seems a tad skewed given the surfeit of cancellations in the pool stages as, Leinster and Toulouse would be the first to claim.

Indeed, viewed in that light, if nothing else there is altogether more fairness in making the Round of 16 two-legged ties. Teams who exit cannot complain they were disadvantaged by playing one knock-out tie away from home.

Giving higher-ranked teams the second leg at home does seem an advantage, and certainly will be if any tie is level after 160 minutes, as this would lead to 20 minutes’ extra time. Furthermore, where before a team had to play six matches to reach the quarter-finals, the same is true this season. The Champions Cup has also had an uncanny having of seeing the best team in the competition lift the trophy, and a two-legged Round of 16 won’t alter that.

While there was a fear that it might lead to glorified dead rubbers next weekend, only three ties look done and dusted, given Leicester, Ronan O’Gara’s La Rochelle and Racing 92 return home with leads of 19, 18 and 13 points over Clermont, Bordeaux and Racing.

All the other five ties are in the balance. Even Harlequins cannot be discounted from overturning a 40-26 deficit against Montpellier at home, all the more so after trailing 34-0 in the first leg – which also demonstrates that huge comebacks are more conceivable in the two-legged format.

Perhaps we’re fortunate in that the three ties involving the Irish sides are among the four one-score contests at the half-way point, and certainly the Connacht-Leinster and Toulouse-Ulster first legs were cracking games played out in front of totally engaged capacity crowds.

As with two-legged ties in football’s Champions League, the concept certainly tempered postmatch celebrations at the conclusion of the first legs, with reactions also decidedly mixed. No one was quite sure whether they had achieved a good outcome or not, Ulster being a classic case in point after their 26-20 win away to Toulouse.

Munster were arguably happier, or more relieved, to have a six-point winning target for their home second leg against Exeter next Saturday in what looks like being another low-scoring tie with fine margins between these two.

With all four provinces in the same half of the draw, next Friday’s return leg at the Aviva between Leinster and Connacht may not be the last all-Irish affair either.

But one other abiding memory from the weekend was the extraordinary atmosphere generated by the sun-baked 28,000 capacity at Le Stadium in Toulouse. From long before the game, all the way through it and afterwards, the ground was a sea of rouge et noir, with dots of white, and was a wall of noise.

In this true rugby city, they jumped up and down and chanted “Tou-lou-sain!” continually in a manner more akin to a football match. The hat-trick hero Robert Baloucoune said it was so loud he couldn’t hear the player next to him.

We may think we have atmospheric grounds in Ireland, but these things are relative.

[ gthornley@irishtimes.com ]