Published in the print edition of the Irish Examiner on Saturday, January 18th 2014

It’s the last hurrah of the rugby’s European Cup in its current form and since the bonus points system was introduced in the 2003/04 season twenty teams have qualified for a quarter final as one of the two best runners-up. Saracens are favourites for that final slot this season; with 15 points already in their pockets simply winning against Connacht today will give them an uncatchable 19 points and guaranteed qualification. Assuming Toulouse beat Zebre to win Pool 3, history too is against a non-Saracens team going through, be it Connacht, Cardiff, Harlequins, Edinburgh or second place from Pool 1. Why? No team has ever qualified for a quarter final as a runner-up with fewer than 19 points.

Ulster and Leicester, playing this weekend for both a pool win and a chance at an invaluable home quarter final, have enjoyed a fairly toothless Treviso in Pool 5. With five rounds played, neither Treviso nor Zebre have earned a single point of any description in this season’s competition. If Saracens indeed secure the second runner-up slot then both runner-up places will have been taken by teams sharing pools with Italian teams. It seems like this happens every year, but how true is it?

In the ten years of the current bonus point system there have only been two seasons (2005/06 and 2012/13) where neither of the best runners-up had an Italian side in their pool. However, having both runners-up come from pools with Italian teams is an equally rare occurrence. It’s also happened just twice, but those two seasons happened to have been consecutive – 2009/10 and 2010/11 – which, along with some miserable early results on entry to the Celtic league, might have served to fuel the “it happens every year” perception. Since then, of the four runner-up qualifiers in the last two seasons just one team – Ulster in 2011/12 – has benefited from the presence of a traditionally weaker Italian side.

After the first five pool rounds both Treviso and Aironi Zebre are pointless. In the bonus point era only once have two teams finished pointless after the pool stages when Treviso and Calvisano did so in 2006/07, but neither were in groups where the second placed team qualified for a quarter final. In fact of the ten teams who’ve gone through the pool stages without a point to their name, including Edinburgh just last season, just five have been in pools with a best runner-up.

For a runner-up to emerge from a pool, as important as having a very weak team is the overall competitiveness of the top two seeds as well as having a third seed team that performs below expectation. After all, first and second seeds with quarter final ambitions should expect to beat almost any fourth seed put in front of them, home and away. In Ulster’s Pool 5, apart from Treviso’s poor performance, powerful French outfit Montpellier were beaten home and away by both Ulster and Leicester. The third seed is often the real difference maker.

Note: the print edition of this article mentioned Aironi instead of their replacements, Zebre. The error was mine.