There won't be much unity amongst the BKT United Rugby Championship fraternity on Friday, 24 May.
The EPCR Challenge Cup final in London will be of keen interest to roughly half of the teams in the URC, even if only one of them are competing in it.
The Sharks will be the URC's representative in the final at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium, but it’s very likely the supporters of the Lions, Ospreys, Benetton, Edinburgh, Connacht, Ulster and even the Stormers will be donning a cherry and white jersey and tipping a glass of cider to Gloucester that evening.
If the Sharks do lift the trophy later this month, it will make an already bottlenecked qualification race for the Investec Champions Cup all the more congested.
As it stands, the top eight teams in the URC advance to next season’s Champions Cup, but that would be reduced to seven if the Sharks pinch one of those qualification spots through winning the Challenge Cup.
With three rounds of the regular season left to play, the play-off picture is a wonderful and chaotic mess.
Of the current top eight, only Glasgow, Leinster, Munster and the Bulls look like being safe bets to be playing rugby in June, with the quartet jostling for position inside the top four over the remaining three weekends.
Below them is a cross-continental game of musical chairs. Ahead of Round 16, just six points separate the Stormers in fifth from the Lions way back in 11th. The bedlam can be neatly summed up by Ulster’s home win over Cardiff back in April, where Richie Murphy’s side dropped from eighth to 10th in the ladder, despite picking up a victory.
Results in recent weeks have been as predictable as a mouse in a maze. Munster’s maximum return from their two-game tour of South Africa came after the Lions claimed an unlikely bonus-point against then-leaders Leinster, while on the same weekend the Stormers were stunned in Cape Town by the Ospreys. Every weekend, one or two results shake up what we thought was the natural order.
Last month, Connacht head coach Pete Wilkins said he had privately mapped out how many wins his team would need to make the play-offs, although was smart enough to keep the number to himself.
Even after back-to-back bonus-point wins over Zebre and the Dragons, this week Wilkins admitted he was still none the wiser about what the magic number really is.
"Every time I have a target in mind, it changes by the following Monday," the Connacht coach said of the slow bicycle race to the play-offs.
"It’s so hard to calculate. I’m tracking it, I’m putting potential tables and potential results for all the other teams from the top eight or top 10 and doing the maths but it changes every single week."
Currently sixth in the table, the province will be doing well to finish in the top seven or eight, whichever is needed for the Champions Cup. Away Interpros against Munster and Leinster bookend a home tie with the Stormers in Galway next week.
It’s a dream scenario for the URC’s organisers with so much on the line. Each weekend there are a handful of games between those jockeying either for a top seeding or play-off spot. For the Irish provinces, the outlook varies.
While not mathematically certain of their play-off place, it would require a miracle and a historical collapse to knock either Leinster or Munster into the bottom half. As such, their target will be to finish inside the top two, which would give them home advantage all the way to semi-finals, or even the final, should they get there.
For Ulster and Connacht, the goal is more modest.
Both provinces are in a real battle to secure Champions Cup rugby for next season, and both will be desperate to achieve it from a financial point of view, with Connacht currently in the process of a stadium redevelopment that will be sure to stretch their budget, and Ulster also having to make well-documented cuts for next season.
Ulster can take a big step towards that goal by milking every point they can out of the Scarlets today. The Welsh side have won just three games so far this season and come into Round 16 in 14th place in the table. With Interpros against Leinster and Munster still to come, the northern province will have nobody to blame but themselves if that don't do the business in Llanelli this afternoon.
The layout of the fixtures for all four provinces is tough, with each side having to play two derby matches across these last three weekends; Munster v Connacht this weekend, Ulster v Leinster next week, before Munster host Ulster and Leinster entertain Connacht in the final round of games.
A clean sweep of Champions Cup qualification for the second season in a row would be an incredible achievement for the provinces, given how the URC’s layout stacks the deck against that happening.
With derby matches protected by the URC, it leads to the situation where the strength of schedule for one team can be vastly different to another.
With one game against each of the other 15 teams in the league, each side’s three remaining regular season matches are against those from their own nation or 'Shield’.
As an example, Connacht’s three extra games are Interpros with Leinster, Munster and Ulster, while leaders Glasgow have had the benefit of an extra game against bottom of the table Zebre, as well as Edinburgh and Benetton.
That same fixture schedule puts further context on the continued struggles of the Welsh regions, with only the Ospreys capable of finishing in the top eight.
The staggered nature of the schedule has, at least, made things easier on those teams challenging for the play-offs.
With the exception of Leinster and Benetton, teams were able to avail of a weekend off last week, before another block of two games coming up, with another weekend off for the Champions and Challenge Cup finals, ahead of the final round of games on the June bank holiday weekend.
For Connacht and Wilkins, those free weekends have helped with how they target the business end of the campaign.
"Having those two games with Zebre and the Dragons, we targeted 10 points out of those two games, not out of disrespect to those teams, we knew it would be so important setting us up for this last block of three," he said.
"It is a way of building those targets and reflecting on that, and building again for the next challenge.
"It’s a nice rhythm for us. The important thing is we’re hitting these last three games with momentum and real self-belief. With that, our destiny is in our hands."
The important thing to stress is for Connacht and Ulster, their destiny is in their own hands, even if the Sharks pinch one of Champions Cup qualification spots. With that Challenge Cup final coming a week before the final round of regular season games, the provinces will travel to Dublin and Limerick respectively knowing whether seventh or eighth in the table will be guarantee them top tier European rugby this season.
Munster assistant Denis Leamy took the simple approach to the permutations this week; win games and the table will take care of itself.
Easier said than done.
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