The Emirates Lions welcome French giants Racing 92 in their Round of 16 crunch match of the EPCR Challenge Cup at Emirates Airline Park on Saturday. Kick off is at 18:30 SA time.

Head Coach Ivan van Rooyen has picked a relatively unchanged Match 23 from their recent trip to Italy, relying on the momentum his troops have gathered over the past three weeks where they’ve picked up a treble of wins.

Earlier this week, the team’s Backline and Attack guru Ricardo Loubscher spoke about how they will approach Saturday’s knockout fixture.

“The biggest thing with them is that, if you look at the French national team and how they play, you can see that style of play filtering down to the domestic clubs. From our point of view, we want to focus on ourselves, but we know that they are a dangerous side. It’s all about expecting the unexpected.”

Loubscher was cautious about a side like Racing 92 who have the knack of being unpredictable on any given day.

“We need to prepare for a massive kicking game as well as a team that is willing to run from their own 22m line. It’s hard to prepare for that but from our point of view, it’s important that we are ready for anything they throw at us on Saturday.”

Asked about pressure ahead of this knockout game, Loubscher suggested that pressure could perhaps be on the French ahead of Saturday.

“There’s great buzz within the camp. We took a lot of confidence out of the last few games in terms of just getting momentum. For this week, we see it as just another game. The big thing for us to just take one more step forward in terms of how we want to play, so we want to make sure that we force our strengths onto them. So let’s see, maybe we can put them under pressure with our style- ball in hand as well as our kicking game,” he concluded.