Countries England
Wales Venue Twickenham | Teams 16 Attendance 54,899 | |
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Tournament format(s) Round-robin and knockout Date October 2008 - April 2009 | ||
The 2008-09 Anglo-Welsh Cup, known as the EDF Energy Cup for sponsorship reasons, was the 38th season of England's national rugby union cup competition, and the fourth to follow the recently adopted Anglo-Welsh format.
As in the previous two years, the competition is contested between the twelve teams of the Guinness Premiership and the four Welsh regions from the Magners League. The sixteen teams are arranged into four pools, with one Welsh and three English teams in each. Teams are randomly drawn into groups, as opposed to previous years when English sides were grouped according to proximity to one another. Each team plays the other team from their group only once, meaning that two teams in each group face two away games, whereas the other two teams have two home games.
Group stage
In the pool matches, teams receive:
The winner of each pool advances to the semi-finals, at which stage a draw takes place to determine the teams that will play each other. The winners of the semi-final advance to the final to determine the competition winner; no "third place final" is played.