The Investec Champions Cup Team of the Season has delivered the bluntest verdict yet on rugby's most contested debate. After Maxime Lucu's man-of-the-match dismantling of Leinster in the final, Planet Rugby's expert panel declared simply: "The Dupont conversation is over."
Lucu, the 32-year-old Union Bordeaux-Begles half-back who has spent the bulk of his career in Antoine Dupont's shadow, accounted for "nineteen of UBB's forty-one points off his boot or his hand" in the 41-19 Bilbao demolition. He was named at No. 9 in the Team of the Season, the verdict reading less like a snapshot of one final than a coronation of a season in which Bordeaux became the first Champions Cup side ever to retain the trophy unbeaten, riding a 32-match winning run across two campaigns.
The selected XV is unapologetically blue and white: Salesi Rayasi at 15, Gael Drean and Nacho Brex either side of Yoram Moefana in midfield, Louis Bielle-Biarrey on the left wing, Matthieu Jalibert at 10 and Lucu inside him. Up front, Jefferson Poirot, Dan Sheehan, Ben Tameifuna, Joe McCarthy, David Ribbans, Cameron Woki, Jack Willis and Alfie Barbeary complete a side that reads as a clinic in modern Top 14 power married to Irish lineout craft.
Bielle-Biarrey, the 22-year-old flyer who finished the tournament as top try-scorer with 10, was singled out as "the player of the tournament and the best winger in the world." His selection capped a Bordeaux season in which the back three combined for 22 tries.
But the Team of the Season also doubled as an indictment of Steve Borthwick's England squad. Both Willis and Barbeary, who would walk into most international back rows in world rugby, remain on the outside of the Borthwick project. Barbeary's man-of-the-match performance in Bath's 43-41 quarter-final comeback over Northampton was described by the panel as the kind of evidence that makes the omission "self-harm."
Willis fared little better. Despite delivering "the individual performance of the Champions Cup campaign" against Toulouse in a losing cause, the openside's continued England absence looks "more baffling with every match." Both players ply their trade outside England, the long-standing Rugby Football Union policy that has effectively gated them from selection.
For Leinster, the side that has now lost five Champions Cup finals in a row, the Team of the Season offers cold comfort. Captain Caelan Doris was overlooked at No. 8 for Barbeary. Tadhg Furlong did not make the front row. Only McCarthy and Sheehan punched through, a meagre haul for the most heavily resourced club in the competition.
The starkest line, though, remains the one drawn at scrum-half. Antoine Dupont, the four-time World Rugby Player of the Year and Toulouse talisman, has been the default answer to "who is the best No. 9 alive?" for half a decade. Lucu's Bilbao masterclass and a 19-point haul that included a try-saving cover tackle has made that answer feel suddenly out of date.
The Dupont conversation, the panel insists, is finally over.
