HEINEKEN EUROPEAN CUP:The greatest club competition in the always offers something new, but certain elements are as perennial as the game itself
IT'S BACK, and it's liable to once again reach parts no other tournament can. As if to prove the point, the 14th running of the Heineken Cup will this evening embrace its 55th entrant, Montauban, whose intimate Stade Saipac will become the competition's 83rd venue next week.
Not, in truth, that there's much else new, and once again we will look to a couple of the usual suspects come the Murrayfield final next May.
Experience counts all right, and in the last eight years, remarkably, only Wasps have come through to win the tournament without ever having reached a final before. No-one has been there and bought the T-shirt more regularly than Munster and Toulouse.
The reigning champions have hit the ground running. Their frontliners have not been so well tested at this juncture for many years. They look revitalised under the new stewardship of Tony McGahan and a revamped brains trust. They have adapted to the ELVs and the new IRB diktat about players going off their feet - which hopefully will be applied as sympathetically as in the Magners League and Top 14.
Keith Earls has given another dimension to their running game. Doug Howlett too, looks set to make a bigger impact than last season, when he didn't arrive until December.
Toulouse were slower into their stride but have begun to find their unmistakeable rhythm. With Yannick Jauzion possibly being converted into a makeshift outhalf given injuries to Jean-Baptiste Elissalde and David Skrela, they meet the form team in England, Bath, at home on Sunday in perhaps the pick of the opening weekend's games (with another of the old Euro warhorses, Leicester, at home to one of the perennial underachievers, the Ospreys, tomorrow). And Stuart Barnes, for one, believes his old club are primed to topple the French champions.
More than anyone in the Premiership, Bath have blithely ignored all the misgivings about the ELVs and the new IRB diktat to score some scintillating tries under their impressive coach Steve Meehan. But Toulouse, Trevor Brennan assures us, "are playing some smashing rugby again" in recent weeks.
"Put your money on another Munster-Toulouse final," he says, echoing the sentiments expressed recently by Warren Gatland when speaking in Galway: "It's hard to look beyond those two."
What odds, then, something all too familiar yet new, and a first ever repeat final from the year before between those two heavyweights? Provided they do not collide before then, that is where the smart money would go.
The bookies agree, making Toulouse marginal 4 to 1 favourites ahead of Munster, closely followed by those other underachievers, Stade Français and Leinster.
Given their unrivalled €18-million budget, Stade's failure to lift the trophy is the greater crime. But Max Guazzini's galacticos appear rejuvenated under Ewan McKenzie. And all their big guns - Juan Fernandez, Lionel Beauxis, Sergio Parisse, the Bergamascos - are firing again after the debilitating demands of a World Cup year. Despite their four defeats from four in Ravenhill, they look like daunting opening opponents for Ulster.
Stade have also set the early pace in France, à la Bath in England, though the case histories of such early-season high flyers as Gloucester and Sale remind us trophies aren't handed out in October.
Leinster's draw in Pool Two had begun to look favourable in light of Wasps' travails (third from bottom), Edinburgh (second-last in the Magners League) and Castres (13th of 14 in France). But then came the wobbles, and it almost seems their campaign already hangs on laying that Murrayfield bogey tomorrow.
If they can, however, navigate their way through Murrayfield and Wasps next Saturday in the RDS, with Isa Nacewa and Gordon D'Arcy to return in December (when Dan Carter will also illuminate Perpignan and the competition with his presence), they could still emerge as serious contenders.
Of course, the same could be said of Wasps, whose training ground bust-up between Danny Cipriani and Josh Lewsey has been interpreted by Barnes as the best news to come out of High Wycombe this season, and Leicester. But that is truest of all with regard to last year's two finalists.
Toulouse, we know, will grown stronger as they season progresses. They have the squad strength and the club culture to go hunting trophies when the knock-out stages roll in, and have Frederic Michalak and Vincent Clerc to come back, as well as Clément Poitrenaud.
They also have the memory of last year's losing final. They recovered from the defeat to Wasps in 2004 when regaining the trophy against Stade Français in 2005.
In an interview with La Dépêchethis week, their captain, Fabien Pelous, described his yellow card for kicking Alan Quinlan in the derriere in last year's decider as one of the biggest regrets of his illustrious career.
Sport hath no fury like beaten finalists.
