time to get rid of Premiership play-off format

ALTHOUGH I have been covering international rugby for ITV and TalkSPORT for over 10 years, my heart is in the Scottish club game, and in particular in the Borders. I was born in Edinburgh and have been passionate about Borders rugby for as long as I can remember, and have been living in the South of Scotland for the whole of this century.

Over the past few years, I’ve had real issues with the play-off system for the Tennent’s Premiership league.  While there is a place for play-off rugby I really don’t get why we have to have play-offs to decide the winner of the top league in the club game.

This weekend we will see Hawick and Currie Chieftains go toe-to-toe at Mansfield Park to decided which team is crowned champions, but really, I have always been signed up to the camp of ‘a league is a league and a cup is a cup’. Whoever wins the league should be crowned champions. Period.

In National One, Two and Three this season, like all seasons, the team who finishes on top is crowned champions and they will have a trophy to show for it. No play-offs in those leagues and rightly so. History will show the winners of the Premiership league to be the team which wins the final – not the team who finished top of the table.

This year it will be contested between the top two in the league, but the fact that a team in fourth place (which happened to be Marr but could have been Selkirk), finishing 29 points behind the league table-toppers, had a chance to make the final based on a one-off game makes a complete mockery of what a league is supposed to be.

As we know in rugby, anything can happen and an early red card can make it very difficult for any team to win.  But the fact that a team which won just over half of their games [10 out of 18] in the regular season cannot be right.

This hasn’t happened yet but it COULD happen and if/when it does (that a fourth placed team could have the trophy in the cabinet while an unbeaten team gets nothing), then how can that ever be considered a fair result?

I have spoken to most of the coaches from the teams in the Premiership, and I know that the format is agreed upon by all the Premiership clubs, but my question has been: why have they gone with it?  The reasons have been mainly that it gives clubs who are in the top end of the league one extra game at least to get revenue in. It also gives a club well off the pace the chance to nip in through the back door and spoil the party of a team which has performed much better than them over the 18 games.  The third reason is that it keeps interest going for the whole season and avoids the dead rubber games at the end.

I get all those points of view, but at the heart of any good competition you must have a set of rules that gives credibility and prevents it from potentially looking foolish if a quirky couple of results at the end of the season leads to the fourth placed team suddenly becoming Scottish Champions.

Of course, there are always critics who are quick to point the finger and shout from the rooftops about what is wrong with something, so it is important to suggest an alternative system which would work better.  This is where I make my suggestion for the future, and I sincerely hope that the Premiership clubs will at least look at it, consider it to be a fair proposal, and then drive it forward.

I believe this proposal would satisfy all clubs’ concerns and make it a far more exciting league which would improve not only the Premiership but also the leagues lower down, and at the same time give the Cup competition (which has shrunk from crowds of 24,000 and more for the final in the old days to around the 4,000 mark presently) a bit of a boost.

So here’s the plan ….

1 – Start all leagues mid-August so that they potentially have a chance to be completed by December (or early January if weather is bad that year). That would leave the latter part of January and February for inter-district competitions and the chance of a club international (or two) for the more ambitious players, while other players could use the winter period for a break following a busy season.

Do we really need the odd league game running into April and May as it does now? I don’t think so.  Luckily the new 10-team format for next season (which I applaud) should prevent that from happening – with the added benefit of clearing the way for those who want to take part in 7s tournaments to do so, without unplayed games encroaching.

2 – The Cup/Shield/Plate/Bowl competitions are in need of an overhaul. At the moment National Divisions Two and Three do not have any participants. Berwick were unable to defend their Shield title as the Shield is now for regional teams only. The Plate has disappeared and the Bowl has become a regional competition.   My suggestion would be to have five Cup competitions in March – quarters, semi and finals day. One Cup for each division would give each club a five-in-one chance of reaching the final at BT Murrayfield. Those are really good odds and a big incentive for any club to play on the hallowed turf.

3 – Here’s the big change to replace the play-offs. The Cup competitions would be seeded from the positions each team finishes in the league at the end of the season.  So the winner of the Premiership would face the eighth team in the first round of the Premiership Cup, the second placed side would take on 7, and so on.  This would be a separate Cup competition which would give all clubs the chance to have at least two games in March with the losing four from the first round going into a Premiership Plate competition.  This would be applied right across the divisions, culminating in all five finals played at BT Murrayfield on a celebration end-of-season Saturday.

This would be a tremendous incentive for all clubs to get as high up the league as they can, meaning no dead rubbers. The key point is that whoever ends up top of the league after the 18 games is crowned Champions.

For the teams in ninth and tenth positions their season is over. The tenth side would be relegated with one-up and one-down. The ninth placed team would remain in the same division.

I’ve kept it very simple, but I believe it ticks all the boxes. Yes, we could go into depth and start talking about relegation/promotion play-offs for the ninth placed finisher in the Premiership agains and the runner-up in National One and this kind of thing (and I would welcome that as I’ve seen some tremendous games in the past when that system was in place), but you start moving into areas of complication whereby the ninth placed team has no other rugby left to play while the second placed team from the lower division will have played potentially several games in the Cup, so let’s not go there and keep it simple for all to understand.

This proposal is neat and tidy, sets out clearly the different parts of the season for the different competitions without the need for over-lapping, and is something spectators and clubs can all easily understand.

I think as well as solving the problem of Premiership play-offs that I and others have, it would breathe life into the Cup competition and make every league game meaningful at the end of the season for all 50 clubs, no matter where they are in the league.