Wasps pleased to get chance to defend Heineken Cup

Heineken Cup winners Wasps are relishing the chance to defend the trophy next season after a boycott that threatened the tournament was averted.

Wasps' 25-9 victory over Leicester on Sunday in the final came only two hours after tournament officials said they had reached an agreement with French and English clubs for Europe's top club competition to go ahead with a full complement.

Both Wasps and Leicester will try to match Toulouse's unique feat of winning the tournament three times, but Leicester - the only team to successfully defend the title - will have to do it without the guiding hand of coach Pat Howard who is leaving.

Wasps, upset winners over Toulouse in 2004, repeated the dose on the same Twickenham turf to beat Leicester and deny this season's Premiership and EDF Energy Cup winners a unique treble.

Captain Lawrence Dallaglio, long weary of the off-field politics that constantly bedevil the game, was delighted to have another shot soon after his 35th birthday in August.

"Today was a great advert for the Heineken Cup and we are all thrilled to bits that we can go ahead next season, it's fantastic," he said. "This competition goes from strength to strength."

Team-mate and man-of-the-match Fraser Waters said it would have been "a travesty" if the London club had been denied the chance of matching Leicester's 2002 achievement of defending the trophy and Toulouse's mark of three titles.

Director of Rugby Ian McGeechan said Wasps had focused on the Heineken Cup from the start of the season, aware that they did not have a big enough squad, particularly after international absences, to compete for the Premiership.

"This was the only competition we could pick our first team for - we targeted it," said the Scot.

McGeechan said his tactics had been to up the intensity from that which Leicester had been used to and his players responded with some frightening hits.

"We talked about the first 10 to 15 minutes and said we had to go full out. We wanted them to be frightened by the intensity of it. That got us into the game," he said.

"There is a great mix of old and young and that told - the experience and the vibrancy in the team."

Head coach Shaun Edwards paid special tribute to the club's fitness experts and reserve team for ensuring his players hit the ground running after three weeks off.

"I cannot speak highly enough of our conditioning staff," he said.

"Every team before who have had three weeks off and gone into 80 minutes... it's stuck out like a million miles. But we looked like we had been playing all the time."

Edwards said the Wasps reserves had kept the first team on their toes by beating them in a not-so-friendly but ideally-suited match the weekend before while Leicester were thrashing Gloucester in the Premiership final.

That proved to be the high water mark of Leicester's season but departing coach Howard remained convinced that the treble was achievable.

"It's possible but it's immensely hard," said Howard, who returns to Australia this week nine years after joining Leicester and then helping them win the Heineken Cup as a player.