Matt Williams: Round of 16 destroys Champions Cup integrity

To have a Heineken Cup winner’s star woven onto your clubs jersey is a symbol of not just winning the final, but of being the champion club of Europe across an entire season.

In the past, that star represented a long and successful journey of sustained excellence. Earning the right to wear the star tells the world of a season of supreme dedication because that is what it used to take to win the Heineken Cup.

The first stages of that long arduous journey were always far more difficult than those not directly involved with the teams realised. To dominate the six pool games, played across four months in autumn and winter, both at home and away, was a tough mission.

The prize for successfully navigating your team’s pool was the privilege of a quarter-final. The evidence of how difficult this process was can be seen in the record of the overwhelming majority of clubs across Europe who rarely made the quarter-finals.

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Without dominating the first four months of the Heineken Cup pool stages, the three knockout rounds were irrelevant. After the pool stages the four leading teams, almost always the best in Europe that season, had earned the right to have the prestigious advantage of a home quarter-final. As in all great sporting competitions, it was a merit-based system.

Sadly, the EPCR have done away with all that integrity, heritage and season -long excellence. This weekend the Champions Cup slinks shamefully into the bastardised Round of 16 with those who made a decision that has all but emasculated this once-great tournament, by radically changing the format, hoping that this dull as dishwater competition will spark into life.

The reason the EPCR administrators took the hatchet to the world’s most successful club competition can be heard across European rugby this weekend. It is the distinct clinking and tinkle of cash that has been traded for the integrity of the tournament.

In the past few seasons running any tournament in a pandemic has been an exceptionally difficult task and the EPCR deserves credit for keeping the competition alive. So when the organisers announced that the format may require some modifications and we were told that home and away quarter-finals would be a consideration, many of us thought that was a plan worth examining.

This is because the quarter-final weekend is the best weekend of club rugby on the calendar. To double the fun with home and away fixtures was a tempting thought.

While the rugby community only saw the opportunity for two wonderful weekends with the best eight clubs in Europe slugging it out in sensational quarter-final rugby, others saw an opportunity. The very substantial amount of bugs bunny (money) that could be generated was astonishing.

Here it is important to remember that money does not only speak all languages, it yells.

Financial killing

Once the bean counters had run their eyes over the numbers and realised how much money a proposed home and away quarter-final could generate they were shocked.

They picked up their HB pencils and walked over to the pencil sharpener that is screwed to the wall, right next to the numbered and audited jar of jelly beans. The mischievous little dears then gave the handle of the sharpener a daring five full twists. They then changed the angle of their bow ties to a jaunty, rugged off centre position.

Armed with their sawn-off HB pencils, they put their game faces on. The bean counters know bugger all about rugby but they can inhale the trail a financial killing like a Great White Shark snorts in the scent of a far-off bleeding tuna.

The HB pencil brigade simply doubled the number of teams and created the Round of 16. Without blunting their pencils they tripled their matchday takings.

For the English and French clubs, who have never been good enough to maintain the high standards required across an entire season to win in Europe, this was like winning the Lotto.

It soon became clear that to get their pile of spondoolies from the so-called elite end of European rugby, it is possible that at the end of the Round of 16 some teams will only have won a solitary match across their entire Heineken Cup campaign of 2021-22.

That’s a result that would have seen them last in their pool in past seasons.

The high-performance culture surrounding the former structure of the tournament has been tossed aside for a type of sporting Soviet, where the rugby proletariat are rewarded without the need to produce anything of substance. A Frankenstein-like creation, with odd, mismatching parts, cruelly stitched onto the body of this once beautiful competition.

I have to admit, it takes some bold-face dealing to scrap the six game pool stage format for a system that is specifically designed to not eliminate teams.

This year we have a competition structured with the direct intention of channelling more French and English teams towards the cash that is now available in the Round of 16. Clubs, who in the past were never good enough to win their way into the lucrative quarter-finals now get a payday.

Kindergarten athletics

The Round of 16 is the Champions Cup’s Kindergarten athletics day. Everyone gets a prize, even those who can’t win in the pool stages. It is nothing more than an ad hoc cash grab that has fundamentally changed the integrity of the Champions Cup but to the wielders of the HB pencils, that seems a small price to pay for putting the Euro front and centre, into the European Cup.

Perhaps the HB pencil brigade are far more academically advanced than us mere humble rugby folk. Strangely, rugby people like our Champions Cup winners to be the team that dominates a merit-based competition which requires sustained winning across the entire season.

Perhaps in their schooldays the HB pencil-wielding students were placed into accelerated learning programs that engrossed them with solving quadratic equations but failed to allow them the space to read the cautionary tales in children’s literature.

I fear that in the very near future the story of killing the goose that laid the golden egg may soon become compulsory reading for all those HB warriors at EPCR headquarters.