Jack Conan: 'If I was paying a lot of money to see my team away it would be frustrating'

Many of the opening round games in this season's Champions Cup were undermined by clubs playing understrength teams

Harlequins rested several big name players in their defeat to Leinster in the opening round of the Champions Cup. Pic: Shauna Clinton/Sportsfile

European club rugby’s golden age passed Jack Conan by, but not by much. The Leinster back row was still a cub in the academy and making his debut at the back end of the 2013-14 season when the Heineken Cup breathed its last.

The competition had changed name, format and HQ, upping sticks from Dublin to Switzerland, by the time he got his first run in the continental event the following season with a brief cameo off the bench against Castres at Stade Pierre-Antoine.

An October game. Remember them?

Pools of four had been reduced from six teams to five that summer but some of the old flavour still survived. Six pool games were played, you met every team in your pot, and the back-to-back December rounds were still packing a punch.

That’s how it stayed for another five years, before EPCR took a knife to the whole thing again with the ‘Swiss model’ introducing us to two gigantic pools and a new round of 16. The last two years have brought a switch to four pools of six teams.

And on it goes.

What is now the Investec Champions Cup has leaked credit and interest at an alarming rate, the regular tweaks harming rather than helping it along the way, and last weekend’s opening round was more reason again for concern.

Undermining too many of the 12 first-round games was the propensity of too many coaches to look at them as the obvious point in time to rest key players, even when squads were already depleted by injury.

Harlequins rested Marcus Smith, Fin Baxter, Chandler Cunningham-South and Jack Kenningham in Dublin against Leinster, and must have wondered what might have been achieved had they gone full bore afterwards.

Cobus Reinach, Sacha Feinberg-Mngomezulu, and Damian Willemse all sat out the Stormers win in Bayonne. The hosts did without prop Emerick Setiano and flanker Esteban Capilla, neither of whom actually played for France last month.

Clermont fielded a frighteningly young side in North London, Regis Montagne and Argentina’s Marcus Kremer being rested. So were Maro Itoje and Ben Earl. The Sharks were devoid of another clutch of Boks for their appointment in Toulouse.

Well, you get the picture. Conan wasn’t champing at the bit to have a cut about all this, but he is an honest enough broker and good enough talker to call a spade a spade, even as Leinster give their all to try and claim that fifth star.

“If I was paying a lot of money to go see my team away… it would be frustrating. But a lot of it's taken out of clubs hands now. When you see mandates from Rugby England or the RFU, whatever it is, saying lads can only play a certain amount of games.

“You kind of have to put all your eggs in one basket to some regard. It depends where you're going in the Premiership and things like that. So it's understandable. Obviously, we're very fortunate here that we have such depth throughout the squad.

“So it's one of those things. It's not ideal for fans, but sometimes it has to happen, doesn't it? Now with the new layout of the tournament as well, you can probably lose a game or two and still squeak through.” 

It’s even worse than that.

Ulster lost their first three pool games last term – to stiff opposition, admittedly - by a combined 89 points yet still made the knockout stages courtesy of a breeze in Belfast against a disinterested Exeter side that had made a dozen changes.

Just five match points got them through.

Thomas Ramos, the Toulouse and France star, had it right when telling L’Equipe this week that, while there are 24 clubs in the competition, you could count the number who “play it properly” on two hands.

This is very much a two-tier tournament: some are happy to scrape through the pools or even bow out. The Leinsters and the Toulouses are the other extreme, clubs scrapping for every last point to further claims come the spring.

“You know if we're not top in the group and do whatever we can to be right up there we're gonna be in a position where we’re going to be going away somewhere for a quarter-final or semi or round of 16, whatever it is,” said Conan.

“You want to have the most advantages that you can by putting the best performance early on. So when you get to the latter stages of the season on this competition, you know, ‘we're home again’ playing in the Aviva or Croke Park, whatever it's going to be.”

If only more felt the same.