Change required as life seeps out of Champions Cup

The Champions Cup pool games came to a close last weekend and while there were some calculations needed to figure out the last 16 seedings, it feels like the life has been sucked out of this Champions Cup pool format.

Every sport has to evolve and I don't want to be resistant to change.

However, adding a round of 16 means that teams with only one win in their pool can go through and survive in the competition.

It might not give that team a great shot at winning the tournament because of an away draw, but it can keep their European hopes alive with less effort, despite not being at the level to win the competition outright.

It's also the reason why teams could afford not to take on the likes of Leinster in the pool stages. They could send a fully changed team to rest their players in order to target their own domestic league, as we saw recently with Stade Francais in Dublin.

That’s not what a tournament of champions should be about.

You should be aiming to take a scalp, knowing that any win could be a psychological advantage should you meet them again later in the competition, the way Leinster approached La Rochelle.

It also doesn’t help that the home and away fixture format has been abolished, meaning that teams play four fixtures against four different teams, but you don’t get to play the same sides home and away.

It takes away some of the rivalries that have been built up in the older format.

In previous years, there was a great focus on the home and away fixtures. If you could win your home games, beat one of the lower seeded teams away from home and get bonus points on the road, you had a good chance of contending for one of the two best runners-up spots.

It meant that teams scrapped for everything, whereas now you just don’t