RUGBY HEINEKEN CUP:IT'S BACK and, as ever with the Heineken Cup, never a moment too soon. Coaches may moan, and rightly so, about the truncated nature of the stop-start European treadmill compared to the packaged flow of the Southern Hemisphere – where competitions are run-off without interruption – but for the rest of us it's great fun altogether.
Arriving along in small doses, it teases a little too much maybe, but this only serves to heighten the quality and scale of its impact. Perhaps because of this, the sense of anticipation is always heightened like with no other competition when the next two-week salvo comes along. There’s bound to be an epic or two every weekend and the forthcoming back-to-back meetings will be no exception.
The scoring system and the size of the Heineken Cup also ensures pretty much everything matters. In advance of the last round of Champions League soccer group matches this week, 11 of the 16 knock-out places were already decided, with only eight of the 32 sides still contesting the remaining places. This made for eight dead rubbers in the 16 matches. By contrast, we know that much, much more will go down to the wire in the Heineken Cup when the final two rounds are run off in January.
Even the familiarity with the cast list doesn’t undermine the competition. This weekend Leinster and Leicester will play their 100th matches in the competitions, joining fellow centurions Toulouse and Munster. And, of the five teams – Northampton Saints, Leinster, Biarritz Olympique, Leicester Tigers and defending champions Toulouse – who have won their opening two games, all are former winners save for Biarritz, last season’s runners-up and two-time beaten finalists.
Already then, things have taken shape. These are the pivotal rounds in every respect, and more so than normally given four of the six back-to-back collisions (Northampton v Cardiff, Clermont v Leinster, Munster v Ospreys and Perpignan v Leicester) feature the top two in their respective pools and, quite likely, the leading two contenders in each pool come the final analysis.
Even the other pools could have critical outcomes. For example, Guy Noves – mindful of Toulouse losing in Glasgow two seasons ago – has picked pretty much his strongest side, as he is also probably mindful of not having their destiny rest on their final match away to Wasps, not to mention pressing on for a home quarter-final. As things stand, that is a luxury perhaps only they and Biarritz, runaway leaders of Pool Four, can afford.
Hence, these back-to-back clashes are not unlike two-legged Champions League knock-out ties. Mini competitions in their own right, they can become a little feisty too given vengeance, wounds and grievances are still fresh from the week before.
History shows us if you extract the Italian teams, a side will complete the double over the same opposition on successive weekends only 50 per cent of the time. History also shows us it is not imperative to complete a double in order to progress, though it usually helps, but it invariably helps to emerge with the better record over the two games.
For example, Ulster came off worse in their back-to-back meetings with Stade Français on points aggregate over the two games last December, even though sharing three tries, two wins and four match points apiece, and could thus reflect a bonus point in either game would have seen them win the pool. Ultimately, Stade’s bonus-point win at home to Edinburgh on the opening weekend, the only try-scoring bonus point in the entire group, proved critical.
Munster broke Clermont’s resistance two seasons ago when obtaining a bonus point at Stade Marcel Michelin before denying Clermont one the following week, having beaten them with a bonus point the year before and then lost 26-19 in the penultimate round – when the sides finished locked on 19 points and Munster advanced purely by dint of their better head-to-head record. On such tiny margins over the next two weekends might qualification depend.
