Those of you who know me well will know that I have a tendency to sound off about the stupid old men in blazers who run sports. There are lots of reasons to get mad at them, but as far as stupidity goes, the Anglo-Welsh Cup (currently sponsored by EDF Energy) is a classic of bad design.

Admittedly whoever designed the tournament was up against it. There wasn’t really any room in the schedule for another tournament, but someone through it would be a really good idea to have English and Welsh clubs playing each other in a domestic tournament, and so it was. What we have ended up with, however, is a mess.

The tournament starts with divisional play. There are four divisions, each of four teams. There is only time for them to play each other once, which means that half of the teams get two home games and the other half get two away games. So already, before any games have been played, half of the teams are looking at their schedules and wondering if it is worth bothering. They do keep the same divisions each year, so things even out in the long run, but it still isn’t good for the tournament.

Then, in a further attempt to reduce the number of matches, they decided not to have a quarter-final stage. Only one team from each division progresses to the knock-out stage. Basically this means that if you lose a game your chances of progressing are very poor indeed, which means that after the first round of games things are already looking bleak for half of the teams.

The only thing that can save the system is if you go into the final round of divisional games with there still being something to play for, but again the system conspires to prevent this. Firstly there are bonus points. These are good in league play, but in this system they can allow a team to lock in a divisional victory with just two wins (as Leicester have already done this year). Furthermore, in the case of ties on points, the first tie-breaker is head-to-head. Had it been, say, points differential, a team with one win from two might hope that by scoring enough points in their final game they could sneak to the head of the division, but all too often the team they are chasing has already beaten them, so there’s nothing they can do.

It doesn’t take a degree in math to work all this out. All it takes is the ability to think like someone who is actually running a rugby team rather than living in some sort of cloud cuckoo land where you assume that every team will try 100% in every game no matter how much of a waste of time it is. As it is, the only way many of the games have been made worth watching is because the coaches have sent out reserve squads whose players do at least have an incentive to play well even if the result of the game is irrelevant. But it could be so much better. All they have to do is change the tie-break rules, and find room for a quarter-final stage, and you’d have a worthwhile tournament.