Home comfort could swing it for Toulon

There are many ways of building this one up, were that even required, but it’s enough to point out merely that the last of the weekend’s four quarter-finals will bring together the last two Heineken Cup champions.

Questions have been asked about both: whether their best days are behind them or whether they have more to come. Our love of simplicity in sports will dictate that the answers in both cases will be dictated by the final scoreline at Stade Felix Mayol.

That end-of-an-era feeling will be personified in the persons of Jonny Wilkinson and Brian O’Driscoll, whose careers are one last swing of a curtain away from ending, and the stakes are multiplied by the carrot of a ‘home’ semi-final berth for the winner.