So farewell to the Boks, Blacks, Wallabies and Pacific Island Warriors, and welcome once more to club rugby – in the highly desirable form of the Heineken European Cup.

And if the Heineken matches are, in formal terms, inferior to internationals, they still have an authenticity not always evident in the inter-continental friendlies played in summer and autumn. There is little that is friendly about the competition for European rugby’s most important prize.