As an occasion, as an encounter to stir the soul and the blood, it was brilliant. It was also agonisingly tense and it was way deep in extra time when at long last, one of the teams drew more than one score ahead.
That team was Toulouse, the aristocrats, the team who began the day as the only team to have won the European Cup five times — well, now they have won it six times.
They thoroughly deserved it. Of course, nothing was easy because they are not a team which plays smoothly, not a team a which gets through a long afternoon without some rather bizarre errors. But they played their way through extra time quite brilliantly. Their right to the cup is
