If the bookies are to be believed, Brian O’Driscoll will bid farewell to Heineken Cup rugby this weekend. Defending champions Toulon are at home and are odds-on to beat Leinster. The golden generation that won three Heineken Cups in four years is visibly ageing and this game could be the end of the line for a few of them.

Jonny Sexton and Isa Nacewa are the notable bodies that won’t be put on the line on Sunday in the south of France. There still remains the venerable D’Arcy/O’Driscoll axis, the brothers Kearney and Luke Fitzgerald in the back three, while Ian Madigan and Eoin Reddan are no poor man’s half-backs, but they will need ball and lots of it to get past a very tenacious Toulon defence.

That means Sunday will be a job for the forwards or, as they are known, Ireland’s Six Nations winners. This will need to be the case as behind the Toulon scrum sits Jonny Wilkinson and, if given the ball, he will move the Leinster pack backwards and often. The English man has enjoyed a French rebirth over the past few years and while we’ll all be concentrating on Brian O’Driscoll, Sky Sports and many others will be looking at Jonny because this too is his last year. As legends go, these will take some beating.

Wilkinson is not your regular out half in that he tackled ferociously and still does. He has an honesty in his game that has suited Toulon’s style, which can alternate between a traditional 10-man game and the panache of Delon Armitage and Freddie Michalak in the back division. And that’s before we mention Mathieu Bastareaud in the centre. We saw in the Six Nations what this powerful man can do. Brian O’Driscoll will be trying to bring him down on Sunday evening and the neck injury that our great one suffered at the weekend had better be well healed by then.

Michalak is a mercurial man in form at the moment and headlined Toulon’s big win over Toulouse last weekend. He is the type of fella we love seeing coming to Thomond Park because he can be flaky but this doesn’t tend to apply at home. In the Stade Mayol, Michalak will be in front of a sellout home crowd and he has the ability to break Sunday’s contest wide open. Wilkinson is expected to be fit for the game and that might see Michalak saved for the bench or start elsewhere. Either way, Leinster will see him at some stage and he will be dangerous.

Winning this game would make Leinster the Heineken Cup favourites and rightly so. It’s down to the pack and the leaders there, Healy, Ross, Toner, Cullen and Heaslip. They have to coax performances out of their younger team-mates because this will be hell’s kitchen. It will be tight and probably low-scoring. In Heineken Cup quarter-finals, home advantage counts for so much and Toulon are defending champions, flying high in the French league. They are favourites for those reasons. Much as we want the All-Ireland semi-final, I’m not confident.

Munster

There is also work to be done in Thomond Park when Toulouse, incredibly, play their first Heineken Cup contest in Limerick. The bookies have Munster as favourites here but I wouldn’t be touching those odds. The visitors are not star laden, apart from their back row of Nyanga, Dusautoir and Picamoles, but they have quality and unlike a lot of previous French tourists to Thomond, little in the way of fragility. Medard, Clerc and Doussain at 10 are solid performers, along with impact sub these days Clement Poitrenaud. Those four have only happy memories of playing Irish teams as all tend to end on the winning side. Toulouse will not roll over on Saturday and Munster will need the breaks – along with the usual Thomond factor.

It feels like decades ago since Stringer, O’Gara, Foley, Quinlan, Leamy, Horan, Flannery and David Wallace were winning Heineken Cups. That generation, unlike Leinster’s, aged nearly all at the same time. On Sunday, only Paul O’Connell and probable replacement Donncha O’Callaghan remain. The supporting cast is brave and formidable, particularly at home, but vulnerable against the very top sides.

Munster will probably win on Saturday. But only probably. Despite the firepower that Earls and Zebo offer, the package that is the Munster back line is a little behind where Heineken Cup winners need to be. This is no-one’s fault, merely where Munster are in their development towards a new team. They should have enough for Toulouse but if the French really turn up, there will only be a score in it. This could easily go the other way.

Ulster

Sometimes Heineken Cup weekends click for the Irish teams; they all win and Irish rugby reaps the benefits. I don’t think it will be one of those weekends unfortunately but we will be represented in the semi-finals for sure and that cert is Ulster.

Beat Saracens in fortress Ravenhill on Saturday night and they will then have the hot favourites to win it out, Clermont, in Dublin in the semis. It’s there for Ulster. Their newly refurbished ground will be rocking this weekend and they have a real chance of winning the last of the European Cups (in this format).

They are good enough. Some of their key men are returning to form and fitness at just the right time and Tommy Bowe is a key addition, as is Stephen Ferris. With Ruan Pinaar pulling every string there is, Ulster are very close to the full package – closer than the other two Irish provinces.

Saracens will rely on Owen Farrell’s boot and the power of the Vunipola brothers but it won’t be enough because their opponents have no weakness, Ulster being the most rounded of the British and Irish teams left.

With a bit of luck and Leinster finding something special on Sunday, we could have three Irish teams in the last four with both semi-finals being played in Dublin over the one weekend at the end of the month. What a weekend that would be.

We’re hoping for champagne/winning rugby, but I suspect it will be the meatloaf variety for the Irish teams on Sunday night. I guess two out of three ain’t bad.