Tommy Martin: Why TMS (that’s Too Much Sport) viewing numbers are tumbling

Cold breath and hot, heavy action. Stuart Barnes and Miles Harrison on commentary sounding pure jealous they weren’t born in Killaloe. Munster would win after a good ding dong and everyone would lick their lips for the return match a week later.

Now? Look what they done to my boy! Tuning in to Munster’s win over Stade Francais last Saturday was like watching a Heineken Cup deepfake. It looked like a 5.30pm December Saturday Thomond Park European tussle, but it didn’t really feel like it.

No harm to Munster, who played well after a tumultuous few months. Storm Darragh had knocked a few thousand off the crowd and Stade Francais had sent over a team for whom the term second string is a kindness. But it was more the inescapable sense of something having been lost with this once great tournament, like you were watching a historical re-enactment of some epic battle from the past.

Rugby fans have been complaining about this for years, since the English and French clubs took a huff at the old Heineken Cup because of how well the Irish were doing and how it was interfering with their league campaigns. So, they decided to both shorten the format and put more of their teams into it. Their attitude was like the apocryphal bad restaurant review – the food was terrible and there wasn’t enough of it.

The ridiculous current format sees a pointless group phase run over four weeks which eliminates eight of the 24 teams. Given that a large chunk of those 24 have no hope anyway or are too busy trying to stay afloat in their domestic league to care, any halfway interested or competent team can reach the knockout stages.

All of which renders the once competitive, compelling and incredibly fun pool stage a sad pantomime version of the tournament’s good old days, as well as a time-filling prelude to the real business of finding out who Leinster are going to lose to in the final.

Of course, what your da still calls the Heineken Cup is simply a victim of a wider problem – that of Too Much Sport. Rugby’s bone-busting nature makes it impossible to send out the best teams every week, and yet the sport’s powerbrokers have laid on a schedule that demands that. It’s the Champions Cup that feels the squeeze, especially where relegation-threatened Top 14 clubs are concerned, and that’s why the competition is like Craig Casey after that crazy tackle by the Stade Francais lock – on its arse.

Too Much Sport is, of course, all down to greed diluting what was great about the thing in the first place. A good example being golf, in which there are now three major professional tours, none of whom are any good.

But Too Much Rugby is a smaller scale version of Too Much Football, which reaches new levels of bloated madness with next year’s FIFA Club World Cup. This is a tournament which nobody wants, other than FIFA and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, which naturally means it is going to happen.

The draw for the 32-club tournament took place last week and threw up such appetising ties as Mamelodi Sundowns against Borussia Dortmund and Porto vs Al Ahly, which has been optimistically fixed for the 82,500-seater arena that used to be called Giants Stadium.

It is an expanded version of the seven-team afterthought Club World Cup that the Champions League holders used to win at their leisure as a mid-season jolly away from the domestic drudge. Now, because FIFA president Gianni Infantino is a greedy little boy who can’t stand to wait four years for everyone to give him his goodies at the actual World Cup, everyone must traipse to the USA watch this nonsense next summer.

Of course, FIFA is simply doing what everyone else in football is doing, which is cramming more games into seemingly non-existent crevices in the schedule. But the expansion of the European club competitions and international formats as well as the tendency for top clubs to indulge in money-spinning long-haul tours in their down time is finally reaching a sort of critical mass, a football version of the 1.5° degree climate change disaster line.

Top players have been crying out about it to no avail. Take Rodri, who revealed in September that players were close to taking strike action in response to the gruelling schedule, just days before his knee buckled playing for Manchester City against Arsenal, the toil of his 63-game campaign from last season still in his legs. It made him seem like the president of the Maldives begging the world to stop using fossil fuels as the last palm tree was disappearing beneath the waves.

The canaries in the coalmine are in the injury lists published around Champions League fixtures, where rich European clubs are frequently forced to shove pimply kids onto their benches to make up the numbers. RB Leipzig had six outfield players on their bench for their tie against Aston Villa on Tuesday night, four of whom where under 18. Dinamo Zagreb conscripted two lads who had played in their UEFA Youth League game earlier in the day to fill out their dug out for their game against Celtic.

And while there has been much hilarity wrought from Manchester City’s recent collapse, most of it from Pep Guardiola’s various public meltdowns, really all that has happened to City is a common or garden injury crisis, a plain and simple list of broken bodies. You can almost view top level football now as less of a sport but more of a meat-grinder. Join Carra, Neville, Keane and Wrighty for the Overlap Abattoir Watch-along. The Barzini boys would have approved.