History and honour at stake as European bluebloods collide

The final of this year's Champions Cup is both traditional and novel. It yokes together the two most successful teams in the history of the competition, but who strangely have never met in the decider.

They were both right there at the beginning for the European club competition's maiden voyage, in the months after the sport went 'open'.

Toulouse immediately established themselves as European rugby's chief aristocrats by winning the inaugural tournament by beating Cardiff in the final, which certainly dates it.

Like the 1987 Rugby World Cup, the first edition was a ramshackle forerunner of what was to follow, with mid-week afternoon group games and fairly small crowds, and an English boycott to boot. (They also skipped the 1998-99 edition, which Ulster won). The Ford Model-T of Heineken Cups: The Arms Park was only half-full for the Toulouse-Cardiff final, played on the first weekend of January 1996.

Leinster were still in an odd halfway house between club side and representative outfit and thus fielded players who were then contracted to clubs in the English Premiership. Conor O'Shea, who was togging for London Irish at weekends, has the honour of scoring Leinster's first ever try in the Heineken Cup in the insalubrious surrounds of a Milan industrial estate.

Jim Glennon, then head coach, would spend the first couple of campaigns negotiating with the likes of Clive Woodward to secure the release of his players for provincial duty.

Rugby's equivalent of the Champions League didn't make much of a dent in the broader Irish consciousness in its fledgling days in the late 1990s - or the Eddie Hekenui years as Donnybrook veterans might recall them.

Even Ulster's 1999 triumph, in a season admittedly weakened by the absence of the