Le crunch, but no bite

LANSDOWNE ROAD will be a strange place on May 24. Irish fans had been primed all week, all season, for an All-Ireland Heineken Cup final.

They will have to settle for Trevor Brennan and a Canadian No 8 called Phil Murphy.

Instead of Munster and Leinster slugging it out for provincial glory on a European stage, Toulouse and Perpignan will meet in Dublin next month and the ERC, the organisers of the Heineken Cup, will have to crank up their marketing machine by several notches in the coming weeks if they are to make the eighth final in the competition's history anywhere near a 47,500 sell-out.