Celtic Bonus Points - Good or Bad?
By Web Team
July 24 2003
Celtic League chiefs have announced that bonus points will be used in this seasons Celtic League. For more information on the bonus points system and a look at whether bonus points have proved successful in the past read on.
BONUS POINTS BONANZA
After it was confirmed last week that bonus points will be used in the Heineken Cup for the first time this season, the organisers of the Celtic League have said that bonus points can also be gained from matches in the Celtic League.
The points scoring system for this seasons Celtic League will be as follows:
Win = 4 points
Draw = 2 points
Score 4 tries or more = 1 bonus point
Lose by less than 7 points = 1 bonus point
Bonus points have been used in the Celtic League in the past but do they really encourage enterprising attacking rugby or is it a case of them simply causing confusion when trying to work out the league positions ?
We have looked at last seasons Celtic League to see if the bonus points system benefited the teams who qualified for the quarter fnals. In Pool A of last seasons Celtic League, the team which finished with the most bonus points were Llanelli (5bp) and they didn't even qualify for the quarter finals. It was also a similar case in Pool B with Leinster (6bp) accumulating the most bonus points but still failing to make the quarter finals.
Interestingly, if we examine the teams who did qualify from Pool A we will see that the group winners Munster had 4 bonus points, Edinburgh had 3 bonus points and the other two qualifiers, Ulster and Neath, had 2 bonus points. Overall, the teams which did qualify accumulated 11 bonus points between them and the teams which didn't qualify accumulated 13 bonus points between them and if there was no bonus points system in place then the final group standings would have been the same.
It was a similar case in Pool B, with the 4 qualifying teams only accumulating 9 bonus points between them (with Connacht not gaining a single bonus point but still finishing 4th) whereas the four teams that didn't qualify accumulated 16 bonus points between them. On this evidence it is hard to see why the bonus points are needed, the only conclusion we can come to from last seasons bonus points is that they give the teams who finish lower down in the table a more respectable number of points.
But do bonus points encourage tries to be scored? Well in theory yes they do as they reward teams who score 4 or more tries in a match but if we look at the Celtic League group tables over the past 2 seasons, in the 2001/2002 season when there was no bonus points system, teams scored an average of 16.3 tries in the group stages. Whereas in the 2002/2003 season when bonus points were introduced for scoring 4 tries or more, teams scored an average of 17 tries in the group stages. So, did bonus points encourage more tries to be scored? Well yes they did but overall teams only scored less than one more try in the group stages than they did in the previous season.
So, will bonus points be a good thing for the coming season? It is quite possible that they will encourage tries to be scored as this seasons Celtic League looks to be the most competitive yet but overall they probably won't have a significant effect on the final standings in the league.
What do you think?
Are bonus points a good thing?
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