This season's European Rugby Champions Cup Final is guaranteed a global audience with one household in Brisbane among the most captive of viewers.

Tony Rees, once of Cardiff and Newport, proved a trailblazer back in 1997 when he became the first Welshman to lift the European Cup with Brive. At Twickenham this weekend, Leigh Halfpenny and Jonathan Davies will battle to follow in his footsteps, also with a French club, to become the tenth Welshman crowned a European champion.

Halfpenny is part of a star-studded Toulon side aiming to defend their title and at the same time claim an historic hat-trick. They face Davies and his Clermont-Auvergne team-mates looking to clinch the Champions Cup for the first time and only the tenth Welshman to own a winners medal.

Little did Rees imagine that so few of his compatriots would follow in his wake. Rees established a rugby career with Neath, Newport and in Australia but becoming a European champion, more by accident than design.

Having briefly worked and played in Japan, the lock was heading for a new life in Australia when he took a phone call from Wallaby legend Nick Far-Jones. The pair previously played together for Sydney University and World Cup-winner Far-Jones was in Paris, acting as a player agent.

He was aware Brive were looking for a second-row and Rees signed three hours before the deadline closed, without any idea even where the town was.

“I had never heard of Brive, I didn’t even know where it was. The first I knew where I was going was when I looked on the map on the aeroplane and saw Brive airport,” re-called Rees.

“While in Tokyo I had watched Cardiff play Toulouse in the previous year’s [inaugural] final and thought it was a good new concept. Then the next thing I know I was on my way to play in the tournament with Brive.

“At that time you could count the number of foreigners in French rugby on two hands. There was Grant Ross, myself and Gregory Kacala at Brive then half a dozen Aussies and Kiwis at the rest of the clubs.

“It was a fantastic experience. Brive was a small community of 50,000 people yet they packed out the ground every week. The culture at the club was fantastic and everyone from the smallest business owner to the wealthy, like club President Patrick Sebastien, wanted to get involved.

“But we had no expectation when we first started in the European Cup. Neath came to us in the first round and we beat them easily [34-19]. Then we went to Caledonia in Scotland and scraped through [32-30]. We beat Harlequins [23-10] with their full array of stars like Will Carling, and won in Belfast [17-6] against Ulster.

“Llanelli came to France for the quarter-final and we won [35-14]. On the strength of that I was picked for Wales A, which was a great honour, but I never got my starting place back in the Brive team!

“We beat Cardiff in the semi-final in Brive which gave us a final assignment against Leicester, the so-called ‘cup kings’ of England. We travelled pretty confidently to Cardiff for the final but what really convinced us that we had to win was when we headed to the Arms Park on match day and saw all the Tigers supporters.

“They were banging on the windows, shouting at us and telling us we had no chance. That arrogance made the mood change on the bus and from that moment on we knew we had to win.”

Against a star-studded Leicester side, Rees was a second-half replacement opposite Martin Johnson as Brive swept the English aside 28-9 to spark quite a party.

“We had a great night out. We took the trophy to Cardiff Athletic Club then had a night out on the town,” said Rees. “The only problem was that we left the trophy in a bar when we each went on our separate ways. I arrived back at the hotel at about 1.00am, having had a lift from a policeman, to see a taxi driver turning up clutching the trophy which had been sent back by the landlord of the pub we had been drinking in.

“When we arrived back at Brive airport there were 5,000 fans waiting for us and 20,000 more in the town centre. It was some party! We met the French president Jacques Chirac in Paris two days later and it’s a part of my life I will never forget.”

This weekend Halfpenny and Davies hope to follow in the footsteps of Rees, as well as most recent winners Gareth Thomas and Gethin Jenkins, to win the trophy with a French club. No Welsh club lifted the Heineken Cup – re-branded this season as the Champions Cup. So the list of Welsh players to own a winners medal is desperately short.

Wales’ biggest success came after Rees when Ieuan Evans, Richard Webster and Nathan Thomas all won with Bath in 1998. Allan Bateman and Andy Newman were successful with Northampton in 2000 while current Wales backs coach Rob Howley followed with Wasps. Jenkins is the only Welshman to have lifted the cup in the past nine years.

“It was great to be the first Welshman to win the European Cup but what I really wish to see is one of the regions go all the way. But there doesn’t seem to be much hope of that at the moment,” said 49-year-old Rees, who now runs his own company in Brisbane.

“It’s not that there aren’t the players or money, it just seems the culture isn’t right and there isn’t enough community spirit like that I experienced in Brive in 97.”