THE FRENCH ARISTOCRATS AGAINST the English gunslingers.
The greatest rugby player of all time against a team which is greater than the sum of its parts.
David versus Goliath? Not quite. But Toulouse against Harlequins still gets the juices flowing for it could perhaps best be described as this: all-out attack versus all-out attack.
If there are fewer than 60 points combined points scored in this afternoon’s Champions Cup semi-final (3pm), something has gone drastically wrong somewhere.
Toulouse are a story every year but Billy Millard’s Quins have perhaps written the most captivating tale in this season’s competition, reaching the last-four stage for the first time in the Twickenham club’s history.
This much would have seemed a massive improbability to anyone who watched fifth-seeded Quins go life and death with a mostly off-colour Glasgow in their last-16 encounter at The Stoop.
It was a virtual impossibility when they landed a trip to Bordeaux Bègles in the last eight.
Here is where rugby can make fools of us all: on 23 March, Harlequins were obliterated by Saracens, 52-7, in a Premiership fixture at Twickenham Stadium. Two weeks later, Saracens were beaten out the gate by the effervescent Bordeaux in the Champions Cup last 16. And a week after that, Harlequins flung the ball around to beat the band and stunned European contenders Bordeaux on their own turf, winning 42-41 in one of the greatest club knockout ties the game has ever seen.
Quins’ 63 tries in their 16 Premiership games this season brings them to an average of almost four per game. They’ve scored three more tries than league leaders Northampton, whom they beat 41-32 to cut the gap between the clubs to six points last weekend.
Nick Evans’ attack has stepped things up a notch as Quins approach the business end of their campaign: they have averaged 36 points in their last five games in all competitions, winning four of them.
Quins’ problem, if they have one, is that their average margin of victory over those four wins was less than a try.
If their defence is porous — and it is — their attack has again become properly electrifying, as it was when they won their first Premiership title in nine years in 2021. It stems from a new-age, typically structured English club attack but branches into something as potent as it is exciting.
Quins deploy multiple runners at the line in an effort to isolate defenders. Their ruck ball ranks among the quickest in the Premiership. They’re lethal in transition, as Ulster found to their cost in the pool stage. Quins are a rip-roaring, points-scoring machine that is built for chaos. Only two clubs have beaten them heavily across both domestic and continental competition this season.
One of them was the aforementioned Saracens. The other was today’s hosts Toulouse, who showed the up-and-coming Londoners a thing or two about a thing or two when they stormed The Stoop back in December.
Somewhat remarkably given they have won the competition a combined nine times, Toulouse have never met Leinster in a European Cup final. They can and probably will amend that record today.
And they’ll do so by doing what Harlequins do but doing it better.
Toulouse’s attack isn’t any less carefully curated than that of Quins but its multiple dimensions provide for a spontaneity that remains unrivalled in European club rugby.
Toulouse play through their opposition, just not in the traditional up-the-jumper, over-the-top sense.
Whereas they absolutely possess the powerful forwards like Emmanuel Meafou to make that initial dent in the carry, their greatest threat famously comes off the next phase where Antoine Dupont — the human embodiment of Google Earth — has typically already identified the most optimal direction in which to spin around the ruck. The scrum-half will find space, a one-two, or both, and Toulouse will roll from there.
You can’t plan for Antoine Dupont; it’s difficult, even, to plan around him such is omnipotence on a rugby field. When the France nine stands between those white lines, you are the party under surveillance.
Harlequins’ only hope of limiting his effect is to slow Toulouse’s ball at source, a job with which the likes of Alex Dombrandt and Will Evans will be tasked today.
Given their infield threats, the temptation may be to defend narrow against Les Toulousains but they’ll roast you down either edge if they get the ball to width. They’re equally dangerous in transition, from which they’ve scored five tries in this season’s Champions Cup and a hell of a lot more in the Top 14.
Playing against a full-strength Toulouse is a huge problem, one for which no team in Europe this season has found a solution — or even come particularly close.
That Ugo Mola’s side have lost eight of their 22 league games this season might seem heartening for Quins but it’s a deceptive stat: five of those defeats came before the turn of the year, in the wake of France’s World Cup.
Meanwhile, Dupont’s only three defeats in club colours this season have come away to Castres in November when he started at out-half, away to league leaders Stade Francais in December when he played only half an hour off the bench, and away to Bordeaux in March when he came on as an early replacement at 10 and very nearly inspired a Toulouse comeback victory in a thriller.
Toulouse today host Quins at ‘Le Stadium’, the city’s football 33,000-capacity football ground formerly known as the Stade Municipal. Antoine Dupont will start at scrum-half. And given the 5-3 split on his bench, head coach Ugo Mola has evidently digested his medicine following his side’s semi-final collapse against Leinster at the Aviva Stadium last season.
That day, Mola opted for a 6-2 and when out-half Romain Ntamack went down with an early injury, Toulouse replaced him with scrum-half Paul Graou and shifted Dupont to 10.
It wasn’t so much that Dupont was unable to affect the game from his stand-in role as it was that Toulouse had forfeited their greatest strength, which was the ability to play the best player in the world in his best position and allow him to bend the game to his will. It remains astonishing that this concession was their chosen backup plan, particularly when they have Thomas Ramos at their disposal.
Ramos was one of two players sin-binned for Toulouse at the Aviva. During their 20 minutes at a numerical disadvantage, Leinster scored four of their five tries in a 41-22 victory.
Only a worse bout of Toulouse indiscipline will leave the door ajar for Harlequins to extend their Champions Cup fairytale today. The five-time European champions should book a Leinster rematch in ominous fashion.
