Saracens won the European Champions Cup in France with the kind of spirit any sports fan would love to see from their team.

For anyone who has never been to a rugby match before, there is almost an obsession among large numbers of fans with seeing it from a vantage point on the side of the pitch.

Where in football these tickets would cost slightly more than behind a goal, in rugby they tend to cost around four times as much and still sell out rapidly.

The reasons for this are obvious, everyone wants to have the best view of a brilliant try being scored and there’s not the partisanship of a football match where a hardcore group will stand behind the goal roaring their team on.

At the European Champions Cup final on Saturday, I was sat behind the goal and even if every seat was the same price, I would have said that I, and not the people on the side, ended up having the best possible view of the action.

With the wet conditions and the way the match panned out, it was only with a seat behind the goal that you could appreciate the full ferocity of the Saracens performance.

What probably seemed like a slugfest on television was truly fantastic to watch if you were supporting Saracens and had the view I did.

For all the flair of an expensively assembled Racing squad, you could see how little space they were given by Saracens. At times the gaps were so small that it seemed like there were two Saracens players on the pitch to every one Racing player.

Playing in Lyon, Saracens didn’t allow the 90% French crowd that were desperate to get behind Racing even one moment of inspiration.

On the rare occasions Saracens did miss a tackle, an even harder one was waiting. Normally this came from probably the best second row pairing in the world, Maro Itoje and George Kruis, but get through them and Racing would just run into the likes of Owen Farrell or Will Fraser.

It was testament to the Saracens performance that winger Juan Imhoff, who scored try after try for Argentina at the World Cup had to come into the middle just to see the ball, and then suffered the same result as every other Racing player.

And then there was Luke Charteris, Racing’s Welsh second row who was surprisingly nimble for a man who stands at 6’11”. But every time he managed to get past a Saracens defender, another charged him down. Almost never did Saracens need to commit two men to a tackle such was the trust they had in each other.

For all Racing’s injuries, and you don’t get much more unlucky than Maxime Machenaud and Dan Carter limping off, it’s difficult to argue that they would have changed the result.

However, despite everything they’ve achieved, Saracens have never quite shaken the ‘boring’ tag.

So, are Saracens boring for the neutral? On the basis of Saturday alone, and without the benefit of the view I had, you could make that argument.

But that would be without seeing the rugby Saracens can play when given the opportunity. The four-try demolition of Ulster in a gale at Ravenhill was, for me, a particular highlight of the first ever European triumph to be achieved with a 100% record.

And whether Saracens are ‘boring’ or not isn’t exactly relevant. No team has a duty to entertain the neutrals over winning and thereby instilling pride in their own supporters.

The limitations of an approach which puts entertainment first and results second was shown in the Bath side which was everyone’s second team last season but ended up being hammered by Saracens in the Premiership final. They finished 9th this season.

On the European level, Saracens have completely revised any idea of what can be achieved by English sides. It was all getting a bit demoralising until this season. The lavish spending of the French sides on what Real Madrid would call a ‘Galactico’ policy of recruiting the best and most high profile players in the world was tearing the France national team apart, but looked almost impossible to challenge on the European club stage.

It was a policy Saracens themselves seemed to implement in days gone by and were loathed for. But now, after diverting resources to their academy, they have created a team of born winners for both Saracens and England.

The benchmark at club level is French big spenders Toulon, who won the competition three years in a row before being knocked out this year by Racing. But Saracens have shown they have every chance of matching them and if they do, with a close-knit squad of homegrown players, it would mean so much more.