Club World Cup a French renaissance for struggling code

Places in the proposed Club World Cup competition could be the prize for the two best Australian sides.

Brumbies fullback Tom Banks takes on the Sunwolves defence in Super Rugby Picture: AAP

Places in the proposed Club World Cup competition that could take the place of Europe’s Heineken Champions Cup could be the prize for the two best Australian sides in the series of Super Rugby-lite matches to be played later this season if and when the COVID-19 restrictions are lifted.

Four Super Rugby sides, the Waratahs, Reds, Brumbies and the Melbourne Rebels, along with the Western Force, are scheduled to play in an all-Australian round robin competition once the coronavirus has passed.

What had shaped as little more than content for the Fox Sports cameras has been given a much sharper edge by comments made this week by French rugby president, Bernard Laporte.

In an interview with French rugby newspaper Midi Olympique, Laporte suggested replacing the Heineken Champions Cup with a 20-team Club World Cup to be staged over seven weekends each year.

It would have taken real conviction by Laporte to suggest that the Heineken Champions Cup had outlived its usefulness, given that he three times lifted that trophy as head coach of Toulon.

“But, let’s be frank, it does not generate enough income,” he told Midi Olympique. “If we want to develop this Club World Cup, we have to find dates. Without the Champions Cup, nine weekends are available.”

Still, his solution gives some indication why global ideas like this always fail in the absence of a global season. This year’s Heineken Champions Cup was scheduled to end next month. Yet at that time of the season, southern hemisphere sides would be battling their way towards the June finals of Super Rugby.

Under normal circumstances, his remarks would be seen merely as the musings of one of rugby’s great innovators but this year is different. Laporte will be the running mate of Sir Bill Beaumont in next month’s elections when Beaumont hopes to be returned as World Rugby chairman. With the game being financially threatened globally by the coronavirus, the world club title is seen as a critical part of their manifesto to inject much-needed funds into rugby.

In the process, Laporte may have added real spice to the series of local derbies to be held in Australia. Although nothing has been finalised with Laporte’s proposed tournament, least of all whether it will go ahead at all, it would make sense for Rugby Australia to turn its five-team series into a playoff.

Given that Laporte has proposed allocating six places to Super Rugby, the logical division would be for the leading two sides in each of the conferences — Australian, NZ and South African — to progress to the Club World Cup.

His format also envisaged four teams each advancing from the English, French and Pro14 competitions, plus the national champions of Japan and the US.

The Brumbies and Rebels led the Australian conference when Super Rugby was suspended after seven rounds but the argument could be made that the international travel component severely disadvantaged the Reds.

It would be pointless to get too heated over how the Australian teams would be selected. Chances are that vested interests in Europe will shoot down the proposal anyway, just as they did to the Nations’ Cup tournament proposed last year by World Rugby.

Yet while the Laporte proposal might be one of dozens of ideas currently being aired around the rugby world, there is no disguising the genuine enthusiasm to make full use of the COVID-19 crisis to throw out what is not working in the game. It might even be that World Rugby now finds the existing environment more accepting of the Nations Cup proposal.

As one rugby powerbroker put it, while discussing the impact of the coronavirus crisis: “I would be enormously surprised to find that we don’t have a more aligned global calendar at the end of this process.”