Toulouse away is one of the most formidable challenges in rugby union. The defending champions of France and the most successful team in the brief history of the Heineken Cup have an aura like no other club, and the past few weeks of action indicate that, after a slumbering start, they are approaching their freewheeling, brilliant best.

A frightening obstacle to your average professional rugby player, but Bath’s Matt Stevens is anything but average. “Toulouse are not where they are for nothing,” he says. “It is going to be a tough game but in our mind there is no doubt we are going to win.” The England international is a prop forward of some certainty even if he has a swelling audience of those who doubt his inner steel, the very essence of a tighthead prop.

Shaun Edwards recently singled him out as the most influential player in Bath’s impressive win at Wasps, 40 minutes after two members of the media leant over to me at half-time, furiously denouncing Stevens’ front-row credentials.

Not hard enough. That is the accusation, and Stevens has struggled to shake off the mantle of a hard-running, tackling, passing prop who lacks that dark five per cent. “It is as if people see your good hands and therefore assume you cannot have the tougher attributes. It is a perception, but water off a duck’s back, to be honest. I have scrummaged in really good packs and I believe I am one of the reasons they have been good scrummaging packs.”

He expects an immense test of himself and the Bath pack from a Toulouse scrum he describes as “good on the short hit. We just watched the tapes of them when they beat Clermont Auvergne in the French final. They are hugely dynamic.”

Whereas Toulouse are preparing a legitimate short hit for Stevens, he is not expecting the murkier blows he took from the opposition second row in one of his earlier encounters with his native South Africa. He laughs at the memory. “Yeah, I got mullered in most of the scrums. Bakkies Botha came through with some nicely timed punches. Butch [James] told me that Bakkies told him he hit me three or four times and nearly cracked my eye socket. He said he hit me and kept on hitting me but in every scrum I worked just as hard, I didn’t back off. He hasn’t hit since then because it is a pointless exercise.”

His detractors doubt whether Stevens has the requisite nastiness to put away a weaker opponent a la Botha. Would he give his opposite man a crack?

“Would I crack him in the scrum?” He pauses between disbelief and horror with the question. “If I thought he was a flamboyant guy who liked to run around but not scrum I would not hit him. I would try and scrummage him to complete oblivion. Bath have done it with some players and had them off the field after 40 minutes, exhausted. That is the biggest reward.”

His argument against the brooding violence that has equally haunted and captivated the game’s history is clean, simple, and more based on team interest than some Quakerlike prop forward pacifism (this is central to what upsets his traditionalist knockers).

“If you cheap-shot someone you are not playing hard enough. To be honest, I am too tired to cheap shot. I am breathing out of my backside because when I hit a ruck I want to hit it so I hurt a person, but I don’t want to punch him, don’t want to give a penalty away. It is clinical; I do not want to lose my head.”

His record backs up his word. In eight years of senior rugby he has been sent off once and yellow-carded once, “for an early tackle on the last Lions tour. I just try and make the most of what I can do; scrum, run with the ball, defend, get on the ball and hit rucks effectively. That’s all I care about. I certainly do not care about perception. I know I am tough enough. I don’t need to prove anything.”

Not at Bath, where his repertoire is revered, though he has yet to convince the rugby nation. In the World Cup he lost the place he filled superbly after Phil Vickery’s suspension. The captain reclaimed the starting berth, with Stevens designated the impact substitute role.

“I was not happy to lose my place, no, I was never happy to lose my place. But in the World Cup it is not about you. Australia in the quarter-final was the biggest game of my life. I was not to start but I was told I would get 30 minutes and that is what I concentrated on. I said, ‘Fine, you’re disappointed, you don’t think you should be dropped, but okay, that is something to worry about after the World Cup’.”

That worry turned out to be his continuing existence as impact substitute to Vickery, a man for whom his reverence is genuine. But Stevens is adamant his time has come and he is sure he will win round England doubters, as he has the lingering few in Bath.

“At Bath I had to play my way out of the role [of impact substitute]. I said to John Connolly [then Bath coach] just back me. They did, I won a couple of man-of-the-match awards and sealed my position in the team. That is all it took, a couple of really good games. The same applies with England; then people will have confidence in me and see me as first choice.

“Right now I can still see people questioning me, although I do not think they should, but then again Phil is a man of huge pedigree isn’t he? He has done it all. My respect is huge but I do truly believe that right now I am the better player so I must prove I should be there. Do it once and I know I will carry on with England just as I have done in Bath.”

Stevens, 25, calls it a make or break year. “I look up to Phil and Os du Randt. To be at that level – and it is a different level – I must play brilliantly for England, brilliantly for Bath and hopefully that will mean I play brilliantly for the Lions.”

The journey to his homeland starts in Toulouse today. He has made a powerful start to the season but this afternoon is another notch up in severity, both personally and collectively. Toulouse have lost only one home game since December 2006 and have lost to just one English team in their past 10 fixtures. Self-applause is ringing around the rugby city after three weeks of sublime attacking rugby.

But Bath and Stevens step into the arena without the trepidation that accompanies most awestruck visitors to Toulouse. Will Bath beat mighty Toulouse? “Definitely, without a doubt,” says Stevens, a booming talent of deep convictions.