The hottest of environments

It’s the French lifestyle that endears you to the country first.

Then the culture, the people and their passion for life that sucks you in.

When I got the opportunity to move my family to France and learn the French rugby way, I dived in. It was something I wanted as a challenge, to put myself in a different environment and learn a new language and way of life. But it was something I wanted to do for my rugby career, to see how I would cope in the pressurised environment of Top 14 rugby management.

That pressure can break you or turn you into a diamond and if coaching is going to be a long-term career for me then how I perform this season will go along way towards determining that.

Last season when I was out of the pro game and working here in Grenoble on a part-time basis, I was also coaching in the Irish junior and schools rugby worlds. I craved to be in an environment that was red hot. This year I found that.

When I played in the Rabo, the English and French clubs complained about the effect promotion and relegation had on their ability to challenge in Europe and I didn’t have much sympathy for them. However, now that I am immersed in it I realise how, particularly in France with two teams automatically going down, the prospect of relegation gets into your thought process when you make your decisions about selection and how you prepare every day.

For my club, FCG Grenoble, this is our first season back in the top division for eight years. When the Top 16 was reduced to Top 14 Grenoble were relegated, went into administration and were demoted two divisions (a fate that our closest rivals Bourgoin suffered this summer). The club lost all their playing staff and had to rebuild completely over an off-season.

Luckily they bounced straight back out of Federal 1 that first season and for the past seven years made their way up the Pro D2 table. Last season we won it by 17 points but because a lot of players’ contracts are sorted by January or February over it wasn’t possible for us to attract many players with Top 14 experience.

But it’s definitely worked to our advantage as we have a team who have worked very hard to achieve their goals and are now getting the chance to test themselves against players they only ever saw on TV. Because they are used to winning games they have a lot of confidence and momentum and that has certainly helped us make a very positive start to the campaign.

We currently lie in fifth place with five wins from eight games and have picked up two bonus points along the way. We were odds on at the start of the season to be relegated, not because we aren’t a good team but because that’s what happens to newly promoted sides here. Bordeaux broke that trend last season when they stayed up but apart from that it’s only been the cashed-up clubs like Toulon and Racing Metro that have shot up the table.

Even though our budget for this season is €14m and we have a population of 670,000 behind us we are far from the biggest spenders teams in the competition.

When you hear about the French clubs’ budgets it is important to understand these budgets include everything involved in running a club, not just player’s wages. Our budget is certainly respectable but given we were just promoted a lot of our budget went into improving the stadium and building new corporate facilities.

Sponsors here are called partnaires and we have 348 this season. They include people like our two biggest, Sogeti and Sneider Electric, to the local bakery. We have a new marque which is the length of the pitch for our Partnaires and each one gets a small cubbyhole area where they can entertain guests and friends. It’s a very informal non-stuffy way to entertain clients and the atmosphere in the marque after a home win is electric.

For clubs like Toulon, Toulouse and Clermont, who aren’t worried about relegation, most of their time is spent fighting battles to make the top six or get a home draw for the play offs.

Relegation affects the quality of Heineken Cup sides when they play the minnows away from home. They always encounter incredibly physical games with the opposition bring huge emotion and intensity to every collision for 80 minutes.

That pressure can lead to some strange decision-making and behaviour among coaches here. I am lucky in that the coaching team I am working with are very experienced and process orientated but there are plenty of stories doing the rounds about players only being allowed one water bottle at training in the baking heat to toughen them up and going through two hours of live scrums the day before a match. There isn’t a week goes by that Midi Olympic isn’t reporting a club in crisis and a coach about to be sacked.

In fact Munster could be the beneficiaries of such turmoil this week when they face Racing Metro in Paris. It’s been strongly rumoured in France that the Castres coaches Laurent Labit and Laurent Travers had been tapped up to take over at Racing in June. Such were the rumours and speculation that the two Laurents were forced to announce Tuesday that they were moving on at the end of the season (coaches are forbidden from making any announcement of a new position until April 1 here in the LNR Rules).

Where this will leave the current coaches Gonzalo Quesada and Patrice Noriega who are only in the jobs a few months hasn’t been clarified. Racing Metro aren’t short a few quid and are backed by businessman Jacky Lorenzetti whose personal wealth reputedly exceeds €700m.

They have signed Olly Barkley this month to cover an injury crisis in the backline and are talking about signing Jamie Roberts and Martin Castrogiovanni over the summer. They aren’t a team you would think play expansive rugby but they currently lead the statistics table in the Top 14 with most average passes per match of 122 (Toulouse are second with 118).

They don’t play with a lot of width, like Munster are currently doing, but they have a lot of big powerful men and use a lot of one and two pass plays to try and punch holes. Because they are so big it’s difficult to turn them over and that’s why statistically they rank so highly.

Their forwards coach is the former Wallaby Patrice Noriega and they seem to focus a lot on this area but I expect the Munster scrum to stand firm in this area.

The current squad has lost their last two games. Two weeks ago we beat them in the soccer stadium here in Grenoble and last week they lost at home to Montpelier. We targeted them in the air with box kicks and cross-field kicks and I’d expect Ronan O’Gara to do the same.

How they will bounce back from these two defeats and the upheaval upstairs is anybody’s guess, but French rugby is maddeningly unpredictable and that’s what makes it so exciting.