Neutral City venue for the Semi – Finals, no wont work.

Peter Burke

It would appear that the powers that be are determined to ruin the game that we all love and support. We have a double whammy here to say the least, first we had the moronic idea of a 20 minute red card and now we have this absolute ridiculous idea of neutral cities to host the semi finals of the Investec European Champions Cup. The EPCR are exploring the possibility of hosting “destination” semi-finals in the same city in the future with Spain, Portugal, Italy among the places under consideration.

Leinster had home-country advantage in the semi-finals in each of their last three wins, for the reason that the EPCR set out in the first place, perform well, top your group, and you get home advantage, not home stadium advantage but nonetheless home advantage. Now any team who tops their group gets this advantage the English media in their wisdom think that this is unfair and I wonder why? Well its simply because the English teams are not good enough so its toys out of the pram for them.

Toulouse for example, who won the other semi-final against Harlequins, also had home country advantage for the same reason, but there have been calls to make it a more even playing field for everyone, which is very unfair to teams who put the effort in to gaining home advantage by playing well, something that eludes some English teams at the moment.

If the EPCR pushes ahead with this idiotic idea the game will suffer. You will have 4 sets of fans all looking to travel to the same city when flights, accommodation food prices will all rise, a neutral city venue will also mean half full stadiums, considering the two semi finals we just witnessed sold over 115,000 tickets, this just wont be replicated if this neutral plan goes ahead.

Now in fairness the organisers have questioned whether the demand would be there for a neutral venue semi final and my thinking is no. Fair enough in the future both matches could be staged in the same city with places like Porto, Lisbon, Marseille, San Sebastian all possibilities, fantastic destinations for a weekend break but not for genuine rugby fans who want to support their team, and consider the cost. Another thing to consider is the tight turnaround between the quarter-finals and ­semi-finals. The temptation to remain with the status quo is obvious given the combined attendance of the weekend’s two semi-finals was almost 115,000, and so it should, why try fix it if its not broken.

I would encourage the organisers to stop looking for ideas to change the current setup and concentrate on keeping our game relevant in an increasingly competitive sporting arena for TV/Media rights, stop changing things that don’t need changing.