| Venue: Aviva Stadium, Dublin Date: Friday, 19 May Time: 20:00 BST |
| Coverage: Live text commentary on the BBC Sport website and app; radio commentary on BBC Radio Scotland and the BBC Sport website and app (UK only) |
In the bowels of the Aviva Stadium on Thursday, Franco Smith was thrown a question about the respective spending power of the European Challenge Cup finalists – his own well supported but hardly filthy rich Glasgow Warriors and the mega-euros men from Toulon, replete with icons of French, South African, Italy and Fijian rugby.
This game will not be decided on budgets, he said, with a smile. Which is just as well, because Toulon are loaded in a way that Glasgow could only dream about.
“It’s not about money, it’s about courage, about will and want, about expressing yourself, it’s about living a dream out there,” said Smith.
“The winner will be the ones who don’t think about what they want but act on what they want.”
Smith uttered those words with a calm intensity. There was passion in his voice, for sure, but mostly it was deadpan intensity, a steely focus on what his team is playing for on Friday night.
His captain Kyle Steyn and scrum-half George Horne also came across as cool and collected before what will be the biggest game of their club careers. They did not shy away from the enormity of what will go down at the Aviva but neither did they want to exhaust their energy by cranking things up too early.
“From an emotional intelligence point of view, it would be wrong of me to excite them too much,” said Smith. “Being overhyped is not what we want. The players want to be as good as they can be and it won’t be necessary for me to say any more.”
EPCR, the tournament organisers, say that about 35,000 tickets have been sold for the final in a stadium that holds more than 50,000. It’s estimated that about 1,800 of those will be Warriors supporters, a number that most probably would have been significantly higher had one not required a small fortune – or a sellable kidney – to afford a hotel room in Dublin.
Prices are always on the eyewatering side in the capital but even more so when there’s a major sports event going on and people are piling in from all corners.
That’s not European rugby – as well as the Challenge Cup on Friday, local heroes Leinster face Ronan O’Gara’s La Rochelle in the Champions Cup on Saturday – but the homecoming fight of the great Katie Taylor in the city that night. Taylor is as big a local hero as any sporting immortal of the past. Such is the pressure on beds, it would not have been a surprise had cardboard boxes at the side of the road gone for top dollar.
Peculiar Toulon present final obstacle for Warriors
From the Glasgow camp there was a definite air of wanting to look themselves in the mirror in the aftermath of the final and knowing that they had no regrets, win or lose. That’s not something Toulon could do when they lost this final last year to Lyon, lost another Challenge Cup final to Bristol in 2020, lost another to Biarritz in 2012 and lost yet another to Cardiff in 2010.
They are the most peculiar of clubs. They have lost all four of their Challenge Cup finals and have won all three of their Champions Cup finals, when Bryan Habana, Matt Giteau, Jonny Wilkinson, Carl Hayman, Bakkies Botha and Ali Williams made them the only club in history to win three European Cups in a row.
They are still star-studded, still carrying a roster of excellence. Cheslin Kolbe is one of the great modern-day Springboks. Bill McLaren once said of the Welsh wizard Phil Bennett that if anybody caught him they got to make a wish and you could say the same thing of Jiuta Wainiqolo, the Fijian wing. He’s devastating.
Toulon have enormous nous at half-back with Dan Biggar and Baptiste Serin and a gnarled pack of forwards. The driving forces are in the back row with the totemic Sergio Parisse in his final days as a rugby player of mighty repute and Charles Ollivon, the wrecking ball French Grand Slammer of 2022.
On paper, they are formidable. In reality, the whole has not been as great as the sum of the parts. Toulon have lost a lot of games in a disappointing Top 14 season. Double figures in defeats is not a good place to be. They sit eighth, which for a club of their pedigree may as well be 18th. Just as with Glasgow, their season rests on this.
Serious rugby man Smith targets history
What a road the Warriors have travelled, from self-doubt and almost self-loathing at the end of last season, to a rebirth under Smith, a quirky character whose sayings sometimes crack his players up but who, at his heart, is a very serious rugby man.
He was not exactly what the Glasgow fans were looking for in the summer – and he knows it. They wanted a name, a bit of glamour, a guy with trophies and charisma dripping off him. They got an intelligent campaigner who knew how to problem solve on the hoof.
“I want to be significant, not just successful,” he told The Guardian recently. “The fact that critics wrote me off from the start shows how success is down to perception. But perception is fickle. I do hope the naysayers now won’t judge a book by its cover any more.”
If that book has an image of Steyn, as captain, lifting the Challenge Cup on the front then Smith, as his coach, will be judged all right. He will go down in history as the first man to lead a Scottish side to a European crown.
He has a steadfast air, a refusal to talk too much ahead of the big night, but he knows that the stakes have never been bigger for Glasgow. They are underdogs, yes. Looking at it coldly, Toulon should probably win, but nobody in France is fooling themselves about the threat Glasgow pose.
“Since the arrival of Franco Smith, they have changed their face,” wrote the French rugby website Rugbyrama. At their best, they said of the Warriors, “they are somewhat terrifying”.
This could be their greatest day.