RUGBY/European Cup Final: Men on a mission. It's been like that for two years now and this is their moment of truth. The chance to banish the Twickenham defeat. In their last team talk together Declan Kidney will say his last bit as Munster coach, so too will Niall O'Donovan perhaps, and maybe even Peter Clohessy as well. Then it will even be Mick Galwey's last address as captain. It'll be heady stuff.

"It's going to be heavy stuff," agrees Galwey, blowing air through his lips as if to accentuate the feeling. "It's going to be emotional stuff, and I'm emotional at the best of times, so I don't want to think about that. I know that when we're in there that's the way it's going to be, but at the same time we can't get carried away with that either.

We have to keep steady heads, because we're going to have to play better than we've ever done before, it's as simple as that. We don't have to hide from that. It's a fact."

As Martin Johnson mused yesterday the final is guaranteed to be a great occasion, "and the game will hopefully live in the memory", but he added the rider that "you'd take a scrappy win over a classic game that you've lost."

Moments after Dean Richards had read out the Leicester line-up Declan Kidney pulled something of a fast one when he unexpectedly delayed his team announcement until later last night. Anthony Horgan's loss is a blow, but it turned out that Munster's selection wasn't quite as uncertain as they let on. Richards had delcared his could be subject to alteration as well. Too late. Fifteen-love to Kidney. The biter being bitten.

They're so alike it's uncanny. Two ultra-professional, unflashy teams sprinkled with an Aussie influence and each having a true sense of representing their people. They're both fairly gnarled and grizzled outfits, with enough experience of big occasions for them to be better equipped than any other final pairing for this huge occasion. It's a wonder they haven't met before.

You can make a convincing case for either of them winning. The unseasonal rain revives unnerving memories of Twickenham and the Northampton juggernaut two years ago. And not only are Leicester as big, but they have more strings to their bow out wide as well, in the gifted dangerman Geordan Murphy especially, while the nagging suspicion lurks that Munster don't have as many strings to their bow (Keith Wood and Mike Mullins then augmenting David Wallace as a gamebreaker).

You could envisage the Leicester scrum shunting Munster, thus stymying their back-row moves and pressuring the Peter Stringer-Ronan O'Gara axis; and their line-out eating into Munster's as Northampton's did while compounding the set-piece pressure by applying their line-out maul as they did to Leinster in the quarter-finals. You also have to wonder how right Anthony Foley is, and both Paul O'Connell and Rob Henderson too. Even allowing for Munster's famed comebacks, were Leicester to move ahead early on they are awesome front-runners.

The Munster pack aren't seemingly as equipped to do a number on Leicester, but they have a resilient ability to hang tough and gradually wear supposedly superior packs down. Their scrum epitomises this, as evidenced in the quarter-final and semi-final when targeted by Stade Francais and Castres.

Indeed, they've actually won 96 per cent of their own scrums in the competition to date, compared to Leicester's 86 per cent. In so many respects, the stats average per match level out (Leicester first) - ball carries: 86-83, metres gained 420-430, breakdowns won 62-69, line-outs won 85 per cent to 86 per cent. Everything suggests there'll only be a hair's breadth in it.

Leicester have outscored Munster in the first quarters of their games (seven points to 4.6), marginally so too in the second and third quarters, but unsurprisingly Munster have been more productive in the final quarter (8.9 points to 5.8). Munster may well have to make more tackles but they could still be finishing the stronger if the game's in the balance in the last quarter.

There's no doubt Leicester may have won their own league too early for their own good. They haven't really played to their best in about three months and have lost that air of invincibility.

They've been hit by a debilitating virus, their poor form epitomised by Austin Healy's weary, off-colour efforts of late and his selection at outhalf may enable Munster to put more pressure on him as Llanelli did in the semi-finals.

Indeed the templates are there to rattle the Tigers' cage, from Llanelli (three times), Harlequins and Wasps.

Compete at the breakdown, stop Leicester applying their imposing if rather robotic patterns, attack their line-out, defend in their faces, and kick in behind them.

Munster, it's true, have stuttered of late also, but they've won the important ones even more convincingly than Leicester.

There's been a belief too that, as Brian O'Brien put it after the semi-final two years ago "destiny calls them." It didn't transpire quite then after all but as Galwey also said earlier this season he knows Munster will win the European Cup one day, he just wasn't sure if he'd reach the mountain top with them.

You even had the idea that defeat to Leinster in the Celtic League final would harden their Euro resolve, and that a final with Leicester was the ultimate calling.

This has provided a few more straws in the wind, Leicester never having won a Heineken Cup match in Wales, with Munster having won the toss for the 'lucky' north dressing-room, where the winners of the seven major rugby matches to have been played here were based.

Most of all though, if the Kidney-O'Donovan era has been about one thing, it's been about instilling belief. You sense this Munster team have more inner belief now than ever.

• Lions player Tyrone Howe has been called into the Ireland squad to tour New Zealand as a replacement for the injured Munster winger Anthony Horgan.