Total commitment to Champagne rugby

Toulouse In focusPhilip Dine explains why the club is so influential in European rugby

Stade Toulousain have made a habit of collecting European records: winners of the inaugural Heineken Cup in 1996, and semi-finalists in 1997, 1998, 2000, and again this year. The only side to have qualified for the competition eight years running (if we exclude the Irish provinces), most matches won, most points scored, biggest winning margin (108-16, against Ebbw Vale in 1998) . . . the list goes on and on.

Yet the French giants' European record only hints at the club's ambition and tradition. Toulouse sides have consistently displayed effectiveness and elegance unrivalled in Europe. But the club has also managed to "save the soul" of the French game. In the process, it has contrived to invent international competitions between elite clubs. Indeed, the story of Stade Toulousain is, in important respects, the story of French rugby itself.

The game's heartland is the deep south-west, with Toulouse its metropolis. Yet, over the years, smaller centres have tended to control the game. The recent prominence in the European Cup of sides like Brive (winners in 1997), Colomiers (runners-up to Ulster in 1999), and this year's French representatives, Biarritz and Perpignan, is typical from this point of view.

Moreover, apparently all-conquering clubs have come and gone with startling rapidity. Stade Français dominated French rugby's early years, alongside their Parisian neighbours Racing Club de France but their eighth championship win in 1908 was to be their last until 1998, when Bernard Laporte built a successful team from scratch with imported players. Stade Bordelais, virtually unbeatable before the first World War, similarly disappeared after it.

Later, the great Lourdes side would dominate the post-1945 revival of French rugby. They were replaced by Agen and then Béziers as the dominant forces between the 1960s and the mid-1980s. Stade Toulousain has managed to remain at the heart of the French game, almost without interruption, since its creation in 1907. The Toulouse club won its first national championship in 1912 and secured its record 16th in 2001.

In spite of the heavy toll paid by French players in the 1914-18 Great War - a sacrifice still commemorated (like that of 1939-45) by Stade Toulousain's own war memorial - the game made rapid strides in the 1920s.

With Toulouse players then, as now, the backbone of the national side, France began to win away from home in the Five Nations (beating Ireland for the first time in 1920). Central to this development was the continued strength of Stade Toulousain, which dominated the club championship throughout the decade. Henceforth, la Ville Rose - the Pink City, as Toulouse is known - would become and remain the real epicentre of French rugby activity.

However, the 1930s were to be the French game's wilderness years, after a combination of illicit professionalism and all too evident brutality led the English-speaking unions to sever relations in 1931. This isolation would be aggravated by world events, and particularly France's wartime defeat and occupation. Yet French rugby re-emerged from the second World War as a more competitive force.

Against the backdrop of post-war reconstruction, the genuine quality of French sides now shone through nationally and internationally. Stade Toulousain won the national championship again in 1947, but this was not destined to be the club's happiest period either on or off the pitch. Yet, paradoxically, the club's temporary difficulties would ultimately serve to confirm the city's position as the French game's spiritual home. More particularly, Toulouse's steadfast commitment to a fluent and attacking style of play would bring it in the later 1970s and 1980s into a bitter struggle for the "soul" of the French game.

On one side of this acrimonious dispute were the dictatorial president of the French federation, Albert Ferrasse, and his protégé as captain and then trainer of the national side, Jacques Fouroux. In the opposing camp was the Toulouse coach Robert Bru, and particularly star players turned trainers such as Jean-Claude Skrela and Pierre Villepreux. At stake was nothing less than the future of the French game.

The national sides Fouroux led and later coached to Grand Slams in 1977, 1981, and 1987 were undoubtedly effective. However, their forward-dominated game of territorial domination was anathema to traditionalists. The Toulouse coaches looked to modernise the French game through "total" rugby based on players switching constantly between roles, the control of space, and continual movement.

The commitment of Stade Toulousain to a new world order significantly predates the French federation's reluctant acceptance of professionalism in 1995. Toulouse showed its ability to take on - and beat - all comers at the club's international tournaments in 1986 and 1990.

In one of the more agreeable ironies of French rugby history, Stade Toulousain became the first holders of the European Cup in 1996, defeating Cardiff at Arms Park stadium (21-18). The undisputed champions of a reinvented version of France's "Champagne rugby", the club remains the standard by which all other French - and European - sides must be judged.