‘We took it personally and we talked a lot about it’

Skipper Justin Tipuric described Ospreys’ 21-10 Champions Cup win against French champions Montpellier in France as “among our best in Europe”.

The visitors upset the odds to put themselves back in the mix for a place in the last 16.

It was only their second win of the season and ended a run of 12 games without a victory in the Champions Cup – a draw and 11 successive defeats.

“That result has to be up there among our best in Europe given we went into the game having not won for such a long time,” admitted Tipuric.

“To win is great, but the biggest thing for us now is to carry on winning. We need to become more consistent.

“That’s the standard we want to be playing at week in, week out. We know we can go up another few gears and we want to push on to be better.

“It’s special to put one over on the French champions. You could see they were hurting at the end and they will come to us in the new year really fired up.”

Coming on the back of a disappointing home defeat to English champions Leicester Tigers, this was a win that came out of nowhere. The bookies had them at 25-1 to win in France.

“Everyone was bitterly disappointed after last week’s performance. We took it personally and we talked a lot about it,” said Ospreys head coach Toby Booth.

“We got the chance to go again and the sign of a good team is that you learn quickly. We learned a lot of lessons out of the Leicester defeat and we proved that tonight.

“But the best part of it was that after the elation on the final whistle, the players were genuinely disappointed that they hadn’t taken more out of the game. It’s nice to have some positivity and to have turned a corner.”

The last win on French soil by the Ospreys in the Champions Cup was in Bourgoin in 2008.