The EIHL has promised changes to the Challenge Cup over the summer, Ant Marie-Jeanne speculates on what a new format could look like.
Aside from the 3rd/4th place playoff, the format Challenge Cup must be the thing the fans of the EIHL love to have a moan about the most. While the 3rd/4th game is, IMO, rightly criticised, you can’t argue with attendance figures as it gets more fans attending than those that used to go to the England v Scotland youth games. Personally, I used to go to that game all the time whereas I’ve only been to one “bronze medal” match – that being Corey Neilson (at the time) and David Clarke’s last game, but that’s not the purpose of this article.
Having 10 teams doesn’t make doing a knockout cup competition easy, at some point, you’ll have to have a group stage and it obviously makes sense to the league for the group stage to be first. This allows all the teams to get a chunk of extra games in, which brings in more money needed to fund the clubs, hugely important for most of the teams who are reliant on bums on seats to survive.
Currently the teams are split into three groups, one group of four teams (Belfast + Scotland) and two groups of three teams, straight away that means some teams playing more games than the others. You’ve also got the “issue” that there is no variety in the groups each season, they’re always the same. I get why it’s done the way it is, geographically it makes sense, it adds to the local rivalries (for us it gives Sheffield four more games to beat us in) and keeps travel at a minimum. Therefore, a straight split into two groups of five has the issue of which team goes into the group with Belfast and the Scottish clubs. Remember when Hull were dumped into the Scottish conference? That effectively ended the Stingrays.
On the flip side, if you schedule the fixtures well and bring in double headers for travelling teams, this would cut down on the travel and likely make it more enticing for travelling fans. To clarify, when I mean double headers, I mean scheduling two away games back-to-back, not that nonsense we had in the past where league and cup games were played as one game. Currently the group of four play six group stage games (one home, one away vs each team), whereas the groups of three play eight (two home, two away vs each team). Two groups of five, one home and one away gives everyone eight, so no loss in games for six teams and a gain of two for the “Scotfast” group.
If you do go to two lots of five and stick with the geographic format, you’ve still got the sticking point of who joins Belfast Glasgow Fife & Dundee, would the league (and the owners of said clubs) really want to split Panthers and Steelers, Steelers and Storm or Blaze and Devils? But then they have already split Panthers and Blaze who used to have a healthy rivalry, geographically it’d probably be Manchester that would make that journey…so yeah, Hull mark 2.
I believe the fairest way is to simply do a random draw (no carrier bags this time please) but my preference would be to use the previous season’s final league table as a kind of seeding system. I know teams tend to have big roster changes each season but if you use the league table, you’d get a decent balance of teams from a performance perspective.
If we use this season’s table as an example, you’d get the following groups:
GROUP A
Sheffield Steelers
Belfast Giants
Guildford Flames
Dundee Stars
Nottingham Panthers
GROUP B
Cardiff Devils
Manchester Storm
Coventry Blaze
Fife Flyers
Glasgow Clan
The biggest loser here would probably be Dundee, no local games and having the longest journey (assuming Belfast elect to fly) down to Guildford (8 ½ hours!!). Fife to Cardiff is no quick trip either, you’d simply have to bring in some double headers to help with travel so Dundee could maybe play Coventry or Nottingham first on a Friday/Saturday then head down to Guildford on the Saturday/Sunday. Fife could play Cardiff and Coventry on the same weekend for instance.
If you wanted to keep the Quarter Finals that’s easier too: The teams finishing 5th are eliminated. Group A’s winner would play the team finishing 4th in Group B (QF1), A 2nd v B 3rd (QF2), A 3rd v B 2nd (QF3) and A 4th v B 1st (QF4) The teams finishing 1st and 2nd in each group would get to decide (where possible) which leg they play their home game.
For the semis you could have Winner of QF1 v Winner of QF2 or QF3 and Winner of QF4 v winner of QF3 or QF2. I’d personally do a live draw though to add a bit of fun – just make sure there are only four teams to pick from please!!! Would Rod Stewart be interested in picking the balls/pucks out?
I don’t like teams in a one leg cup final having home advantage. The fairest way around this would be to go back to two leg finals. But then again, the final is meant to be a spectacle of sorts, so a one-off game is better, but where do you host it? As much as there are complaints about the Play Off Finals weekend always being in Nottingham, it’s currently the rink best suited to hosting an event like that (I am not putting Nottingham forward as a host venue here by the way).
A one-off cup game should be a whole lot easier to schedule at a neutral rink but how far in advance would this need to be booked, and then, how well attended would it be? For instance, in previous years we’ve had Sheffield and Cardiff as host venues, that was fine when they made the final as it boosted sales, but remember Panthers winning it in Sheffield against Cardiff? Only about half the arena was full and that was mainly down to Panthers, imagine it was, as an example, Guildford v Belfast in the final in one of those rinks?
This year, Sheffield played host as the highest ranked team in the final and the game was midweek. How many Flames fans were able to make the trip? What a huge advantage that was for Sheffield, which you could say was earned because of their performance in the competition, but it didn’t make for much of a spectacle, it was just another Steelers home game.
When the EIHL moved to the standalone final, it was initially set to take place on a day, at the weekend, where no other games where being played – it was encouraged for neutral fans to attend too. That didn’t last long, fixture rearrangements and a lack of ice availability made sure of that, but a final should be a focus point, right? It adds a bit more prestige IMO.
So yeah, the fairest way would be to go back to two leg finals, with the team who performed the best in the competition getting the choice of 1st or 2nd leg at home (where possible), playing the games midweek then becomes less of an issue.
A potential idea would be to have a decent sized host venue on a weekend and have a final four like we do for POFW. The biggest problem with this is you couldn’t have it too close to POFW otherwise it’d likely detract from that, which means having the semis and the final ideally before the end of December. Which means unless you start the season a bit earlier, jamming a whole lot of fixtures in early on. You could alleviate this a bit by scrapping the Quarter Finals, so the top two from each group qualify for the “magic weekend”. Surely all of the teams could play their eight cup games in September and October yeah?
Pricing would be a huge factor here. The league need to make money of course, but could you really have 2 weekends where fans are paying around £100 for a ticket? I really don’t want to see an end to the Play Off Finals weekend as it’s a great way to end the season, although I hear the call from those who would like to see that scrapped and replaced with a “proper” Play Off format, something which I can’t see happening anytime soon in the UK without a huge financial investment. Also, define what’s proper. Just because they do that elsewhere, why do we have to follow? The league champion being the main champion sits right with me as they’re the team that have performed best over the course of the season, not just turned up for a few games at the end.
What about Glasgow as hosts? A quick Google tells me it has a capacity of 4,000 for Ice Hockey. Anyway…
I’ve had other random ideas on reformatting the cup, such as having a straight knockout for round one (two legs), the five winners then go into a group, play each other once home and once away, then either the group winner is declared the champ or the top two play a final.
How about giving the previous years winners a bye to the Quarters then having 3 groups of 3 for the first round?
I’ve also thought about including the NIHL National League sides too and having a pure knock out FA Cup style competition, but with the vast differences in import levels this would likely make for some very one sided games; maybe you could alleviate this slightly by playing one leg games in the first round with the NIHL teams playing at home.
You could also scrap the cup altogether and simply add the extra games to the league schedule, which would be a huge shame for me. So yeah, let’s not do that.
How would you change up the Challenge Cup? Let us know! It will be interesting to see what the EIHL decide to do for next season.
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