Gatland: We are desperate to deliver

WASPS will make history if they beat Gloucester in tomorrow’s all-English European showdown — and finally discard their status as Heineken Cup under-achievers.

Lawrence Dallaglio and company have won five major trophies two league titles, two English knockout cups and last season's Parker Pen Challenge Cup since the Heineken Cup was launched eight years ago.

But the nearest they have come to conquering Europe was in 1998 and 2000, when their Heineken Cup hopes disappeared at the quarter-final stage both times.

Wasps have played 36 games in the competition, losing more than a third of those encounters, and rugby director Warren Gatland concedes it is time they delivered.

"The Heineken Cup is a competition in which Wasps are the first to admit they have not performed that well," said Gatland.

"We have let ourselves down in the past, but now we've qualified from the pool stages, we are desperate to progress beyond the quarter-finals. There is a lot of expectation on us after what we've done over the last 12 months, and we don't want to let ourselves down again.

"We would have preferred a team from a different country, so that the side and their fans would have had further to travel and the players would not be so familiar with our ground."