When Wasps run out at their High Wycombe home on Sunday England's most recent winner of the Heineken Cup will be the first to sample Europe of the future.
The champions of 2004 and 2007 play Stade Français, once one of the big beasts of French rugby, but now, like Wasps, seeking former glories as well as the 20th and final place in next season's European Rugby Champions Cup, the competition that replaces the Heineken at the top tier under a deal signed a month ago.
After the first leg and the return at Stade's rebuilt Stade Jean-Bouin next Saturday, the side that win on aggregate go through to join the best six clubs from the Premiership, the French Top 14, and the RaboDirect Pro12 plus the winners of the Heineken Cup played in Cardiff the same day.
It is a simple enough formula, but it took 18 months for the warring factions to agree, even when it was obvious that English and French dissatisfaction meant the Heineken Cup had run its course. In turn that meant Stade did not know their fate until the final day of the French season, while Wasps had to wait a week longer.
"We could have ended up with Toulouse, or it could have been Castres," says Andy Goode, the Wasps fly-half. "If Morné Steyn had kicked a conversion to level it against Toulon in the last minute of the last game, Stade Français would have ended in sixth place; Castres would have been seventh."
Considering that Castres, the reigning French champions, ended the 77-game winning home streak of Clermont Auvergne last Saturday, it sounds like a close escape, but Goode is convinced Wasps will have their hands full for the next fortnight.
"The names on their roster are pretty impressive," says Goode, who won two Heineken Cups with Leicester at the start of a career that has taken in Brive and Natal as well as Saracens and Worcester. "Gonzalo Quesada has revolutionised the way they are playing. They're throwing it around, Hugo Bonneval at full-back, Julien Arias on one wing and Digby Ioane on the other. They are running from everywhere.
"I heard a rumour that [the captain, Sergio] Parisse would be back, but whatever team they pick it's going to be good. This has been their most successful season in the Top 14 for some time. They were top of the league for some time," says Goode, who added that, for much of the season, Wasps also looked good to qualify as one of the Premiership's top six.
"To us this came as a bit of a second wind," he says. "The whole way through we said we had to be in the top six to get into it, but there was that period from the end of January to the middle of February when we lost four on the spin and ended up chasing our tails. Then this play-off thing came out of the woodwork."
After home and away wins against Grenoble and Bayonne, Wasps believed they could still get to Europe's top table by winning the second-tier Amlin Challenge Cup, before the new deal and a late April visit from Bath ended all that. The Amlin was gone, replaced by the play-offs between the sides that came seventh in the English and French leagues.
"We've hardly had time to get our head around it," says Goode. "We've known about this game for six or eight weeks, but we didn't know it until Quins beat Exeter away two weeks ago that we'd be playing."
Next year it will be different. The chosen 20 will again be made of up the top six teams from the three leagues plus the Heineken cup winners, but the play-offs will involved four clubs – two from the Rabo being added – with the Challenge Cup winners again promised a place.
