Cup rugby needs an injection of jeopardy

THE Heineken Cup, as we knew and loved it when Friday nights at Sardis Road and Saturday afternoons at Thomond Park were almost as exotic as a weekend in Paris or Toulouse, was the place where true rugby folk felt most alive. We must therefore ask ourselves how it became the tournament where boardroom mediocrity goes to die.

- CHRIS HEWETT

It is difficult to blame the tournament’s governing class for the ruinous effects of the pandemic, although it is tempting to try. But we can certainly hold them responsible for introducing a seeding system specifically designed to protect the powerful from the powerful; for failing to attract the “portfolio of blue-chip sponsors” we were promised after the political convulsion and palace coup of 2013-14; and, most recently, for reinventing geography by including South Africa on their map of Europe.

Add to this the dog’s breakfast of a pool stage currently in place, the intricacies of which knock the challenges of quantum computing into a cocked hat, and it is barely possible to work out how the tournament continues to deliver.

But deliver it definitely does. Last weekend’s “round of 16” produced Champions Cup classics, major and minor, in venues as diverse as La Rochelle, Exeter and an anonymous corner of North London best known for its police academy, together with one of the Challenge Cup variety at dear old Cardiff Arms Park. Compelling? Yes, and then some.