Gerry Thornley On RugbySo Leinster only attracted 7,200 for their poorly trumpeted move to Lansdowne Road. No surprise there really. In fact, you could see it coming. Whereas Leinster had three months to sell the Biarritz quarter-final last season when 42,000 turned up, they had only two weeks this time.
He who pays the piper (namely Sky) calls the tune and, for example, the dates and times for rounds five and six have yet to be finalised. It wouldn't happen in the Champions League.
Recall their fans' residual anger that they'd been ripped off in the quarter-finals and especially the semi-final last season, add in a cold Saturday afternoon before Christmas, and a Donnybrook-sized crowd was waiting to happen.
Off the pitch, Leinster have become something of a joke, but - injuries apart - at least on it they remain in good health. Their search for a successor to Matt Williams last summer may not have been the slickest operation imaginable either, but back in harness on Saturday, it was an encouraging Heineken European Cup start for the Gary Ella reign.
He was the first to concede that the basis was established by the pack, whose set pieces destroyed a half-hearted and half-interested Biarritz, and by extension this underlined the importance of keeping Willie Anderson and Roly Meates on the coaching ticket.
Once again home wins heavily outnumbered away wins; 10 to two overall, and nine to one, or 90 per cent, excluding games involving the Italian clubs. Viewed in that light, Munster's win in Bourgoin could be reasonably hailed as the result of the opening weekend.
That they achieved it can no doubt be largely attributed to the competitiveness of their all-international pack in meeting a heavyweight and highly regarded Bourgoin unit head-on, and, as ever, the exceptional place-kicking of Ronan O'Gara. Success breeds success and however much the personnel may change, Munster have been to France and bought the T-shirt many times over.
This was Munster's 15th visit to France in the European Cup and they've had to learn the hard way. They lost on their first five treks to French soil, but have now won on six of their last 10 visits there.
It is unusual in the extreme that an away side wins in the European Cup when outscored in tries by the home side. All the more so when the visiting outhalf is afforded more kicks at goal than the home placekicker, and it is almost in the realm of flying pigs when the away side defends a one-point lead without conceding one kickable penalty at goal in the final 10 minutes.
Sorry to be so cynical about this but no-one can claim that referees universally interpret the rules in the same way and one imagines it was to Munster's relief that Nigel Whitehouse was the referee in charge at the hostile Stade Pierre Rajon. He is a fine referee, the best in Wales (and better than anything in Scotland or Italy) and up there with Alain Rolland, Chris White and co.
No wonder the 9,200 home supporters were apoplectic. They are not used to this. In their previous 13 games at the Stade Pierre Rajon over the previous year, Bourgoin had won the lot, averaging over 39 points per game.
Much of this can no doubt be attributed to the infamous home and away mentality of French rugby players and teams. The church bells echoing around the village in the morning. Representing the "parish". Partisan home crowds, with ne'er an away supporter in sight.
French rugby fans, as we saw in last year's European Cup final in Dublin, just don't travel. Nor, judging by the performances of Biarritz, Perpignan and even a subdued Toulouse, do their teams, not in spirit anyhow.
Away teams cower in the face of such hostility - there seems almost to be a resigned air about them - and so too, perhaps, do referees. Indeed, one ventures that the propensity of "homer" referees is probably higher in France than anywhere else.
Not wishing to sound like a stuck record, for this column has been here before, but the trend of penalty counts favouring home teams seems, if anything, to be getting worse, and hardly anyone says "boo" about it anymore.
Even in the World Cup the Wallabies enjoyed the higher number of penalties and most of the key marginal decisions in their pool decider, against Ireland, in the quarter-final against Scotland, in the semi-final against New Zealand and perhaps most clearly of all in the final against England.
Rightly, such perceived "bias" in favour of the co-hosts, Japan and South Korea, at the last football World Cup was widely condemned, yet by comparison it seems to be overlooked in rugby, especially in the European Cup, where, perhaps because they are more hemmed in, closer to the pitch and more partisan, the crowds possibly influence the referees more.
However, while feasting on the glut of European Cup rugby over the weekend, the inevitability with which decisions invariably went the way of the home sides, particularly in tight games, devalued the enjoyment. For much of the time you simply feel away teams are unfairly up against it.
And it's not just the penalty counts. Even the five- or seven-point decisions seem to mostly go against them. Like Eric Miller's try against Biarritz, deserving reward for Leinster's excellent lineout it may have been, but he was Leinster's "extra" man in the lineout. Or Juan Martin Hernandez's try for Stade Francais against Leicester, bizarrely awarded by Alan Lewis and Olan Trevor despite an apparent knock-on and failure to ground the ball properly, which was only marginally less laughable than the theatrics by Diego Dominguez which earned him a three-pointer for a supposed late hit by Lewis Moody.
ERC argue that only 80 per cent of grounds are equipped to provide recourse to video referees, but surely it's better to have them most of the time than not at all? And one ventures that, more often than not, it is the away sides who'll be left to rue their absence.
