This Saturday the Heineken Cup pool stages bring French giants Stade Toulousain to Cardiff to face the Blues for a third consecutive season in the European cup competition.
It currently stands at one win apiece for the two teams and after last season’s quarter final defeat, Toulouse will be looking for revenge.
December brings the crucial double headers to the Heineken Cup and all teams are well aware of the importance of these matches.
Director of Rugby David Young on the back to back December matches;
“These 2 games are obviously massive in the shake up really you’ve got to win your own games so Saturday’s game is absolutely critical for us and our onward involvement in the knock out stages.
On the quality of Toulouse;
“Normally you can look through a team and say there’s 2 or 3 key players but when you’ve got the budget of Toulouse and you’ve got the world stars they’ve got, they’ve got some real influential players right across the board really.”
On Casey Laulala’s first start last weekend;
“Casey showed glimpses of how good he can be with the ball in hand it would’ve been nicer if we’d given him a few more opportunities which maybe wasn’t the case really.
“Obviously he’s still quite new to all the patterns and the plays and so on and he’ll be far more comfortable this week. It goes without saying really, we know what quality he is and he showed yesterday glimpses of his attacking flair which he’ll bring to us.”
On the busy period ahead;
“We’ve talked about it as a team, we’ve got 6 to 8 weeks which will probably define the season and there’s no easy games and there’s no games where the result doesn’t really matter and you’ve got time to catch up .
“The Magners league games are massively important to us and obviously the Heineken cup games are as well, It’s a massive 6 to 8 weeks and they’ll make all the difference either way to how the latter half of the season goes.”
Tickets for the game have now reached the 10,000 mark and the Blues team are hoping for a big crowd, which was all important in last season’s win over Toulouse, to help spur them on this Saturday.
Cardiff Blues:
15. Ben Blair 14. Leigh Halfpenny 13. Casey Laulala 12. Jamie Roberts 11. Tom James 10. Sam Norton Knight 9. Gareth Cooper 1. Gethin Jenkins 2. Gareth Williams 3. Faao Filise 4. Deiniol Jones 5. Paul Tito 6. Andy Powell 7. Martyn Williams 8. Xavier Rush
Bench:
16. T Rhys Thomas 17. Sam Hobbs 18. Gary Powell 19. Scott Morgan 20. Sam Warburton 21. Richie Rees 22. Ceri Sweeney 23. Tom Shanklin
