Clermont Seeks Perfect Heineken Cup Campaign

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/18/sports/rugby/clermont-seeks-perfect-heineken-cup-campaign.html

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As a Canadian who still follows North American sport closely, Jamie Cudmore probably has a better grasp of the concept of a perfect season than any other likely participant in the Heineken European Cup final Saturday.

But the lock forward also knows that sealing the competition’s best single-season record will be a secondary objective when his club, Clermont Auvergne, plays its French compatriot Toulon in Dublin for rugby union’s equivalent of soccer’s Champions League trophy.

“I’d like us to complete a perfect season and I’d be very proud of it,” said the 34-year-old from Squamish, British Columbia. “But what really matters is winning the Heineken Cup.”

Victory in this clash of first-time finalists would make Clermont the first team to take the trophy after also winning all six pool stage matches since the Heineken adopted its current format in the 1999-2000 season. Brive won every match in 1996-97, but played only seven games, compared with Clermont’s nine.

That victory is widely predicted. Clermont is an expensively assembled multinational juggernaut mixing the talent of French stars like half-back Morgan Parra and center Wesley Fofana with high-class imports like wing Sitiveni Sivivatu of New Zealand and playmaker Brock James of Australia.

Clermont also topped the regular season standings in France’s Top 14 championship. Head coach Vern Cotter is reported to have been offered the job of Scotland national team coach.

Mourad Boudjellal, the sharp-witted comic book magnate whose millions fund Toulon, evidently concluded that the most effective way to counter these qualities was to add to the pressure of expectation on Clermont.

“Clermont is scary. We’re facing a great team, and you’d have to be crazy to think you were better — so we are steeling ourselves for defeat,” Boudjellal told La Montagne, the daily paper in Clermont’s hometown, Clermont- Ferrand “But we’d still be second in Europe, which wouldn’t be so bad. And if by some miracle we win, we’ll be ready for it.”

Cudmore agreed that the team for which he has played since 2007 is very good and has every chance of winning. But he is not counting any chickens.

“Toulon is one hell of a team and a massive challenge for us,” he says of an opponent that finished a close second in the regular season standings. “There were only three points between us in two matches in the French championship — we drew at their ground last month and won narrowly on ours earlier.”

Clermont has much more experience of big finals, although not all of it is good. It won the French championship final in 2010, but that victory followed losses in the three previous finals and 10 in all dating from the 1930s.

“That took a long time coming, but it made winning the Heineken the next step,” Cudmore said. “We want to be up with the great teams in Europe like Toulouse, Leinster and Leicester, so we need to get that star on our jersey.”

Clermont also has local knowledge on its side, with two visits in a little more than a year to Aviva Stadium in Ireland.

In the first, the Heineken semifinal last season, Clermont lost, 19-15, to eventual champion Leinster; it was a match Clermont could have won. “Memories of that have been our focus this year,” Cudmore said. “We didn’t want to feel like that again.”

This season, it went back to Dublin in the pool stages and beat Leinster 28-21, completing a home and away double that ended the European reign of its host, the Heineken winner for the past two seasons and three of the past four. “I’ll remember that and be proud of it until I’m old and gray,” Cudmore said.

“French flair” may be one of rugby’s abiding clichés, but a flowing try-fest is unlikely. Of the 109 points scored in three previous all-French Heineken finals, each won by Toulouse, only 15 came from tries.

Cudmore expects “high-pressure rugby in which you try to stifle your opponent, hold them to as few points as possible and pressurize them into mistakes from which you can counterattack.”

It may also have a rapid sequel, since each is in the final four — and kept apart in the semifinals next weekend — of the French championship playoffs.

For the moment, though, all that matters is the Heineken. “It is massive for us,” Cudmore said, “and not just for our club, but for our city and our region.”