One of life’s great truisms, as well as a cliche (they can be both), is that you’ll never see a bookie on a bicycle. Nowadays though, one ventures that this might well be a more common sight, given that driving a car in any city in Ireland is a fairly joyless experience most of the time.
That aside, it will come as no surprise that the bookies make the home side favourites in all eight Champions Cup round of 16 ties this weekend. History certainly supports this probability, given that all eight home sides advanced when the one-legged Round of 16 was introduced in the 2022-23 season.
What is more, the same was true in all four quarter-finals and both semi-finals in that campaign, although in each of the last two seasons there has been one away winner in both the Round of 16 as well as – of course – a first away winner in a semi-final for four seasons when Northampton beat Leinster.
Hence, of 42 knockout ties in the last three seasons up to the finals, the home side has emerged victorious on 37 occasions. To further underline the scale of the task facing the travelling teams over the next two weekends, the two Round of 16 away winners in each of the last two seasons did so by a solitary point, La Rochelle beating the Stormers in Cape Town two seasons ago by 22-21 and Munster beating Ronan O’Gara’s team 25-24 a year ago.
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Both outcomes reflect the buy-in to “Europe” which La Rochelle have had under the competition’s all-time leading points scorer and, of course, his former province.
Ditto Harlequins when beating Union Bordeaux Bègles 42-41 in an extraordinary quarter-final two seasons ago, while Toulouse’s 21-18 win in Toulon at the same stage last season was courtesy of a penalty with the last kick of the game by none other than Thomas Ramos.
Just to shine a further painful light on Leinster’s loss to Northampton, it was only the second time a side with home country advantage had lost a semi-final in the last eight seasons. The other occasion was when Racing 92 curiously moved their semi-final 200km away to Lens and lost 20-13 to La Rochelle four seasons ago.
Needless to say, the odds point to another home clean sweep this weekend. The home sides are, on average, over 15-point favourites across the eight ties. Bordeaux Bègles are 1-200 to beat Leicester, who are 33-1 to win, at the Chaban-Delmas on Sunday (4pm local time/3pm Irish), which are quite extraordinary odds in what is effectively a two-horse race given the draw is 50-1.
The Leicester head coach (and Craig Doyle’s on-screen buddy) Geoff Parling is required to give his key internationals a mandatory post-Six Nations break at some point and has chosen to prioritise a top-four Premiership bid by resting Ollie Chessum, Joe Heyes and Nicky Smith among others for this Champions Cup Round of 16 tie.
It has echoes of a year ago, when Mark McCall did likewise in sending a weakened Saracens side to Toulon and were duly beaten 72-42. McCall did so in the additional knowledge that had his team won in Toulon, their “reward” would have been a quarter-final a week later away to Toulouse.
Similarly, were Leicester to defy the odds and win in Bordeaux, they would be away to the winners of the Toulouse-Bristol tie. Suffice to say, it’s not the handiest route to the semi-finals.
Clearly though, it is one of the competition’s many flaws which has not been addressed that the quarter-finals are a week after the Round of 16; not least that it only gives the four home sides to market the tie and sell tickets.
Imagine Uefa and Europe’s leading clubs treating the Champions League like that?
Nevertheless, that three-time champions such as Saracens or two-time title winners such as Leicester are prepared to virtually sacrifice their continuing presence in the Champions Cup in preference to their domestic league is an awful look for the competition. The damage to the tournament goes way beyond these matches.
But this is the price the competition pays for the French insisting upon the primacy of their domestic Championship and compressing the Champions Cup into eight weekends instead of nine.
The English clubs, with their delusions of grandeur, maintain their unholy Anglo-French alliance and acquiesce when you’d have thought that properly promoting and partaking in the Champions Cup, and ensuring themselves of a third home tie every season would be welcome in an era when financial problems have shrunk their “Prem”.
The way Paddy Power are calling it this weekend, the only one-score games might be the Harlequins-Sale and Toulon-Stormers ties, where the home sides are just two-point and five-point favourites. Maybe there’ll be surprises. Maybe, once again, there might be a solitary away winner.
Alternatively, an accumulator on all eight home sides winning is just over 3-1 – or 3.18-1 to be precise, which says it all really.
