Clermont Auvergne vs Toulon European Champions Cup final 2015 preview: Clermont a romantic choice to beat Toulon’s global talent

Toulon are looking for a third straight victory in Europe but face their French rivals at Twickenham

Steffon Armitage has been pressing his claim for a World Cup place with his displays for Toulon (Getty Images)

If ever a major final needed a pantomime villain to generate some local interest – "local" being England, whose own contenders have disappeared off the face of the earth for the seventh time in 11 years – it is Saturday's European Champions Cup showpiece at Twickenham involving the two most powerful teams in France – the reigning champions Toulon and the perennial under-achievers Clermont Auvergne. Happily for the organisers, one of these sides operates on the dark side.

Toulon command respect: they wear the French domestic crown as well as the European version, and if they prevail they will break new ground by winning three successive cross-border tournaments. What they fail to command is love. They may not have splashed the cash with quite the same abandon as the Parisian club Racing Metro, but their success has been bought and paid for in euros rather than in the ultimately more honourable currency of player development.

“You are wrong about them,” argued one esteemed chronicler of the French game on Friday. “You can buy players, and Toulon have done so, but you cannot buy a team.” Really? Only the most spell bindingly useless coaching set-up would fail to coax a performance from a squad boasting three World Cup-winning Springboks, a couple of wondrous Wallabies, an All Black prop as good as Carl Hayman, a smattering of cutting-edge Argentines and Leigh Halfpenny, the pre-eminent goal-kicking full-back.

The best part of 50 players have had a top-end involvement with the Cote d’Azur club this season and the overwhelming majority have been buy-ins. Of today’s starting line-up, only the front-row forward Xavier Chiocci is a local product: the others are drawn from foreign lands or from rival clubs in the French Top 14 championship – Mathieu Bastareaud from Stade Francais, Sébastien-Tillous Borde from Castres, Guilhem Guirado from Perpignan.

Toulon coach Bernard Laporte walks past the Champions Cup (Getty Images)

Or, to look at it another way, what happens when they do produce some worthwhile talent? The sensational midfielder Gaël Fickou, born a few miles along the coast, looked every inch a flag bearer for the club’s youth set-up, but quickly found his progress blocked by the so-called “galacticos” and pushed off to Toulouse in search of some meaningful game time.

For these reasons, allied to a widely shared exasperation at the preposterous outpourings of Toulon’s president and principal financier, Mourad Boudjellal, neutrals will be hoping and praying that Clermont, probably the best side never to have won this competition, secure themselves the title they have craved for so long.

Their chances were enhanced yesterday when two key players in the spine of the team, the scrum-half Morgan Parra and the No 8 Fritz Lee, were declared fit. Parra is well known to the English audience, partly as a goal-kicker of unusual potency and partly as a game manager of the highest class. Lee, a powerful Samoan, has been one of the tournament’s stand-out performers.

Toulon lock Ali Williams scores in the quarter-finals (GETTY IMAGES)

Assuming there will be something close to parity in the grunt-and-groan department – both sides can scrummage the house down and know their way around the line-out – the rival back-row units may well hold the key in their heavily taped-up hands. Clermont do not possess a groundhog scavenger like the exiled English flanker Steffon Armitage but Lee, aided and abetted by international forwards as strong as Damien Chouly and Julien Bonnaire, could easily make a different kind of statement, every bit as loudly.

Yet the fact remains: Toulon know how to win these games, largely because they have a squad full to overflowing with winners. It hardly matters to them when Maxime Mermoz, a Test centre of considerable calibre, pulls out with illness on the eve of the final. They can play Juan Martin Hernandez, “le Maradona du rugby”, in his place.

Clermont Auvergne beat Saracens in the semi-final (Getty Images)

They are also deeply united – as united a bunch of mercenaries as ever set foot on a rugby field. “I was unsure about what kind of dynamic I’d find at the club when I first arrived from Australia,” said the Wallaby wing Drew Mitchell. “I soon found that the dynamic was one of collective respect. To earn that respect – to elevate your standing in the group – you have to prove you deserve a place amongst those guys, all of whom got where they are now by being ultra-competitive.”

As a manifesto on behalf of his wildly successful team, Mitchell’s words were persuasive enough. Even so, Clermont will be the ones who tug at the heart strings today.

Teams:

Clermont Auvergne: 15 Nick Abendanon, 14 Noa Nakaitaci, 13 Jonathan Davies, 12 Wesley Fofana, 11 Naipolioni Nalaga, 10 Brock James, 9 Morgan Parra; 1 Vincent Debaty, 2 Benjamin Kayser, 3 Davit Zirakashvili, 4 Jamie Cudmore, 5 Sebastien Vahaamahina, 6 Julien Bonnaire, 7 Damien Chouly (c), 8 Fritz Lee.

Toulon: 15 Leigh Halfpenny, 14 Drew Mitchell, 13 Mathieu Bastareaud, 12 Juan Martin Hernandez, 11 Bryan Habana, 10 Matt Giteau, 9 Sebastien Tillous-Borde; 1 Xavier Chiocci, 2 Guilhem Guirado, 3 Carl Hayman (c), 4 Bakkies Botha, 5 Ali Williams, 6 Juan Smith, 7 Steffon Armitage, 8 Chris Masoe.

Kick-off: 5pm

TV: Sky Sports 3