A weekend of sobering losses has left the Premiership with one representative in the Investec Champions Cup, causing what feels like an annual bout of soul-searching. There are several factors to reflect upon, some of them familiar.
Too many Premiership sides qualify anyway
For the Premiership to have eight out of its 10 teams in the Champions Cup, an elite tournament, always seemed absurd. And this season was likely to see something of a pinch. The collapse of three top-tier English sides during the 2022-23 campaign initially brought about a redistribution of talent within the Premiership. After that, though, clubs cut their cloth and recalibrated.
Having reached the Champions Cup semi-finals last season, for instance, Harlequins lost André Esterhuizen and Will Collier, two of their most influential individuals, over the ensuing summer. Among the departures from Northampton Saints, who also made the final four last term, were Alex Moon, Courtney Lawes and Lewis Ludlam. Jasper Wiese left Leicester Tigers. Saracens and Sale Sharks bade farewell to highly experienced figures. Bristol Bears sought to trim their squad and cut spending.
Harlequins and Leicester qualified for this term’s Champions Cup with 50-50 records in the league last season. They each won nine and lost nine of their 18 Premiership fixtures. Exeter Chiefs were marginally better, winning 10 and losing eight, yet have stuttered this campaign. They have kept company with Newcastle Falcons at the bottom of the domestic table while taking on the might of Toulouse and Bordeaux-Bègles, shipping 133 points across those two matches and 52 more on a trip to Ulster.
The format of the Champions Cup sends 16 of 24 teams into the knockouts. Such generosity, allied to a seeding system, can cruelly expose those that limp through. Leicester, Saracens, Sale and Harlequins all ‘earned’ last-16 ties with two wins and two losses in the pool stages. Was their inferiority that much of a mystery, particularly given three of them encountered opponents featuring most of the Scotland, France and Ireland Test line-ups?
Perspective is required as well. Saints will expect to oust Castres at home and reach the semis again. When two Premiership teams reached the semi-finals of last season’s Champions Cup, it was the first time since 2016 that there had been more than one English representative. In 2021-22 and 2020-21 there were no Premiership semi-finalists at all. This is not a new phenomenon.
Timing, priorities and bad luck
A lot of Eddie Jones’s analogies pertain to cricket. He has used another, though, that likens a team’s maturation to a clock. Everyone is working towards a small window at the top of the hour, the former England coach says, where everything ...
