The mood music to world rugby is reasonably sombre, even after a thrilling Rugby World Cup a little more than 12 months ago, where South Africa achieved the seemingly impossible by claiming back-to-back titles.
The financial reality of professional rugby is finally starting to resonate with the decision makers within the game. In a lot of ways rugby has overtraded. Operational budgets with unrealistic wage demands, or expectations, are out of sync with the incoming revenue.
Is the Champions Cup on its last legs?
Despite the RWC any notion that rugby might become a global sport has surely been put to bed with Japan’s regression on the international stage, the Tier 2 nation competition failing to drive any interest and professional rugby in the US hardly making an impact relative to other sports.
The reality is that professional rugby is a small sport in a global context, and domestically it is fighting against sports with larger playing numbers.
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There are two showcase events in the global calendar, the Lions tour and the RWC, that do not need much if any attention. Outside of these two events, the rugby proposition needs to be as compelling as possible everywhere.
The United Rugby Championship (URC) has been rejuvenated by how it has embraced the South African franchises and incorporated them into a competition that was overly dominated by Irish teams.
The Premiership in England is currently enjoying a rich vein of form and has serendipitously benefited from three clubs going into receivership.
The Top 14 has been leading the way for years in both playing styles and supporter base, something that neither of the other two competitions have really been able to recreate on a consistent basis.
The former jewel in the crown, the European Cup, now the Champions Cup, is barely treading water in a stacked rugby and sporting calendar. The halcyon days when the European Cup was the envy of club competitions around the world have been consigned to history.
The status of the tournament is slowly being eroded, initially through poor governance and now by the quality of the product. The ambition to adopt a European football-style sponsorship model, where sponsors share tiers rather than an out-and-out headline sponsor, massively backfired when they struggled to fill all the sponsor positions.
Changing the format to accommodate the South African teams has also not worked. The decision making was most likely sound enough, but it has been hindered by the law of unintended consequences, or the oversight on some logistics – for example, the difficulty of transcontinental travel has not been offset by lure of embracing teams made up of world champion players.
That embrace is not reciprocal. It was Jake White last season and this season it is John Plumtree coming out and addressing the elephant in the room.
Most recently, the Sharks heavily rotated their squad for the trip to Michael Cheika’s Leicester and as expected they shipped a heavy scoreline. Looking across the results and starting teams over the opening two rounds of the Champions Cup, the Sharks were not the only team guilty of fielding a weakened or rotated matchday squad.
The southern hemisphere teams are not alone in picking and choosing matches. Richie Murphy’s Ulster used the trip to Toulouse as an opportunity to get some younger academy players game time before a more familiar-looking team lined out against Bordeaux-Bègles.
The upshot of this is that academy players made their debut in the Champions Cup, with Murphy continuing to try to fast-track young players in the hope he can build a squad from within. The question remains, not just for Ulster but for most teams, do they have enough depth to compete on two fronts?
Smaller squads with increased financial pressures and the same number of matches don’t add up.
Ulster will argue theirs is a work in progress. Cormac Izuchukwu was the find of last season and adds a dynamism that helped Ulster find the gainline. Jude Postlethwaite, Zac Ward and Aidan Morgan all played well individually but the collective Ulster performance was below that of Bordeaux-Bègles.
As a match, however, it was enjoyable to watch, mostly because both teams showed up to play. A half-time lead of 19-14 for Ulster in Ravenhill was a fair reflection of the home team efforts, although they never looked comfortable even with a five-point lead.
The second half is where the French outfit found a different gear to pull away. That period was an excellent comparison of the different attack styles between the two teams, and what sets Bordeaux-Bègles and Toulouse apart from the chasing pack.
Ulster are more reflective of an Irish structured approach, with a couple of individual moments creating line breaks or quick rucks with gainline advantage. They created opportunities but were one or two passes short of being able to take advantage. It looked on more than one occasion that they simply ran out of players in attack.
Their balance between building shape in attack - which requires bodies, spacing, running lines and simply holding space and catching and passing at the right time – is off. Bordeaux-Bègles are at the other end of the spectrum, lighter on structure but they kick into gear more naturally on turnover ball, line breaks and positive carries.
Guido Petti’s try, created for him by a sumptuous Damian Penaud reverse pass, came as the secondrow saw the space and hugged the touchline for almost two minutes after an attempted block down on an Ulster kick exit.
Toulouse and Bordeaux-Bègles were shining lights in an otherwise bleak round of matches for the Champions Cup. What is clear, is the existing format does not work. The quality of matches is dropping and because of that some tough decisions are required to protect the long-term future of this competition.
It is a competitive landscape for viewers. The fundamentals of professional rugby have shifted, and the Champions Cup needs to respond or risk drifting into obscurity.
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