C
Captain Morgan
Guest
There's a lot of us about up here at the moment. By that I mean All Blacks, Wallabies, Springboks, all of us playing in the northern hemisphere. It has caused controversy back home and up here, but we're going to keep coming. And I can tell you one of the reasons we find the proposition so attractive. Money, the cynics will say - well, yes, it plays a part. But, as a rugby player, I would say the Heineken Cup.
The first thing I liked about it was the way the pools were just drawn. Who you got was purely down to luck, which offered a great deal of excitement and something different for the players. Which is why I am concerned about the recent announcement to introduce seeding. There hasn't really been any seeding at all so far - you could get anyone, anywhere. Now they want to rank all the teams according to merit, so that we have pools of equal strength across the board. It is a mistake and will take away a bit of the magic.
I loved that sheer excitement of finding out who you were going to get each year, and I think it is devaluing the pool stages to have all the teams streamed in order of quality. The Heineken Cup as it stands is not like a World Cup where it is just a question of getting out of your pool before concentrating on the knockouts; getting out of your pool in the Heineken is a massive battle in itself. You tinker with that at your peril.
The Heineken Cup is not meant to be a procession into the knockout stages for the strongest teams. The unpredictability of the pool stages is one of the tournament's greatest strengths. There were a lot of complaints this year about the pool of death with Munster, Wasps, Clermont Auvergne and Llanelli Scarlets, not surprisingly most of it from those within the group. But that was a cracking pool, and I watched it all, just as a fan, regardless of the fact that my team, the Ospreys, were in another.
Last year, at the other end of the scale, Northampton were in an easy pool and managed to get relegated from the Premiership and reach the semi-finals of the Heineken Cup. They beat Biarritz in their quarter-final in San Sebastián in front of 30,000, and they deserved it. Most of all, though, it was great drama, thrown up by the uncertainty of the draw. I say all of that despite the Ospreys being pipped to the quarter-finals as a best runner-up by Northampton, because they had racked up more tries in an easier pool.
This season we have made it to the knockouts, which is third time lucky for me, having been squeezed out not only last year, but two years ago with Leeds. The buzz of our quarter-final at Saracens next Sunday is something I cannot wait for, but we are there only as a best runner-up, so I still have not won a pool in this competition.
All of which puts the Super 14, the equivalent in the southern hemisphere, in the shade. This is a far superior competition - it is much tougher and it offers up the variety that is terribly missing in the Super 14. There, you have the same teams and the same players. One year you'll be playing at the Bulls and the next you'll have the Bulls at home, but that's about it as far as variety goes. If you play 10 years of that, as I did, it gets tedious. That was what pushed me away - I just got stale.
It is a serious problem for the southern-hemisphere teams, and it extends into the Tri-Nations, where the same players pull on different-coloured jerseys and do it all over again. That is why viewing figures and attendances are dropping - it is basically New Zealand, Australia and South Africa playing each other for six months of the year and, after a bucket-load of that, people are turning off their TVs. As a contrast, consider the reaction for the Lions tour to New Zealand three years ago - the entire country was abuzz a year before the Lions visited, not because they were so great but because they were something we had not seen for 12 years, something different.
Wales had just won a grand slam back then, and they have now won another, but for the Lions tour to South Africa next year there will surely be more Welshmen selected than there were by Sir Clive Woodward in 2005. I must just say, it has been great living these past few weeks in the country that is going to win the next World Cup! The place is on a real high. The Welsh do get emotional about their rugby, but this time there is a level-headedness to go with the excitement, and the sense that it is just the start. We at the Ospreys hope to continue the process next Sunday.
Justin Marshall is a former All Black who is in his third season of the Heineken Cup and plays scrum-half for the Ospreys[/b]
Source: http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/sport/2008/03/...its_grim_d.html
