Pressure is on for struggling Stade Francais in Champions Cup

The Top 14 champions have had a dismal start to their domestic campaign, and with Leicester and Munster in their opening Champions Cup fixtures, the pressure’s on for coach Gonzalo Quesada.

Last Sunday Stade Francais woke to find themselves bottom of the Top 14. Just two wins from their first seven matches had taken last season’s champions to the foot of the table, a humiliation that was eased a few hours later when they dug out a dour 14-9 victory over Clermont in Paris to climb up to 11th.

It wasn’t a pretty win, but then there’s been little attractive about Stade’s rugby this season. Blame the World Cup? No, that would be the easy excuse and one, which for the most part, Stade have refrained from employing.

The absence of 13 players for the first month of the season, including captain Sergio Parisse, tighthead prop Rabah Slimani and South African flyhalf Morne Steyn, was a hindrance, but that doesn’t explain the paucity of the Parisians’ performances.

Flyhalf Jules Plisson, one of several of Stade’s internationals not involved in the World Cup, admitted. “Last year, to win all our matches, we had to be at 200%. Since we’ve become champions, perhaps unconsciously we feel less need to be at 200% to impose ourselves.”

Plisson added compared to some of their Top 14 rivals, Stade’s squad doesn’t contain “an armada of internationals”. True, Stade welcomed this week Australia scrum-half Will Genia and Springbok flanker Willem Alberts to their squad. But the spine of the squad that won last season’s Top 14 title is homegrown. The regular backline last season contained six Frenchmen with Fijian centre Waisea the only outsider; similarly the pack that subdued Clermont in last season’s Top 14 final boasted five Frenchmen.

Encouragingly for Stade, many of these Frenchmen are young with Plisson still only 24, full-back Djibril Camara, 26, centre Jonathan Danty, 23, and wing/fullback Hugo Bonneval turning 25 later this month. As Plisson explained: “We’ve built our team on the desire to play together, on the pleasure of being together and the heart that each of us brings to his work. That esprit de corps was evident in Sunday’s win over Clermont. It was an errorstrewn match and one that the visitors nearly won in the dying minutes as they launched wave after wave of attacks at the Stade Francais tryline. The Parisians held out, however, and who knows how important that defiance might be in the context of their season. “The team spirit reassured me enormously in the last 10 minutes,” commented Gonzalo Quesada, Stade’s erudite coach. The former Argentine flyhalf was appointed to his position in 2013, a brave acceptance on his part given Stade Francais’s financial problems.

Two years earlier, in the summer of 2011, there was strong speculation the club would be declared bankrupt, resulting in automatic demotion to the amateur leagues of French rugby.

It was an extraordinary situation for the most debonair of French clubs. It’s now largely forgotten that before the emergence of Toulon and their colourful and controversial president, Mourad Boudjellal, it was Stade Francais that pioneered French glitz and glamour.

The flamboyant Max Guazzini, during his tenure as president, introduced dancing girls, pink flowery playing shirts and the erotic Dieux du Stade calendars with the club’s players wearing little more than a discreetly placed rugby ball to protect their modesty.

But, as the money rolled in, so did the titles, with Stade Francais winning five Top 14 titles between 1998 and 2007, as well as reaching the final of the 2001 Heineken Cup Final. But a bad business deal plunged the club into a financial crisis in the summer of 2011 and Guazzini announced they needed €6.6m to survive. Various consortiums expressed an interest but none followed through and, for a while, it appeared Stade would go the way of Montauban and Bourgoin, both of whom were relegated to the lower divisions.

Then the Savare family came to the rescue. Their business is Oberthur Technologies, a security solutions company that began life in 1842 manufacturing bank notes and is now the 53rd wealthiest company in France with a €900m revenue.

Head of the family business is 48 year old Thomas, whose initial investment in Stade Francais has swelled to more than €30m. It’s caused a family rift with his two sisters “evicted” from Oberthur’s management board two years ago for questioning his decision to invest in the club.

The first couple of years as president were not easy for Savare. The club had spent heavily in transforming their decrepit Stade JeanBouin ground into a spacious, comfortable and slick stadium that holds 20,000. Most matches it’s full and qualification for the Champions Cup will help pay off the debts accrued from the stadium’s renovation It’s the first time in six years Stade will play in Europe’s showpiece, proof of how far they fell and how far they’ve climbed in recent seasons, but how they’ve been lucky with the draw. Want to pull in a big crowd? Simple, land two well supported heavyweights in Munster and Leicester. The club is delighted to be back in Europe, although there was scant evidence of their enthusiasm at Monday’s official launch of the competition in Lyon. Stade Francais boycotted the event, declining to send captain Sergio Parisse to the photocall, because of their anger at being forced to travel to Leicester tonight, five days after grinding out the win over Clermont.

If a trip to Welford Road wasn’t daunting enough for Stade Francais, the following week they host Munster at the Stade JeanBouin. The last Irish side the Paris outfit met in Europe’s leading competition was Ulster, and their clash at Ravenhill in December 2009 was a match of brutal infamy.

Prop David Attoub and scrum-half Julien Dupuy were both found guilty of eye gouging and banned for 70 and 23 weeks,respectively. For a club that had built its reputation on elegance and sophistication, it was a shameful episode, one that perhaps accelerated Stade’s descent.

Dupuy is still at the club, a reformed character now, having finally matured. His game has also got better with age and he won’t give up the No 9 jersey to Will Genia without a fight.

Similarly the tussle for the flyhalf spot will be intriguing. Plisson is the fans’ favourite but his game has stalled over the last year; too often his kicking lacks direction, which one could also say about his decision making. Morné Steyn waits in the wing, and as he proved in last year’s Top 14 final (Plisson was injured), the South Africa is an arch pragmatist on a rugby field.

In the three-quarter line, the Champions Cup offers the chance for Jonathan Danty, Hugo Bonneval and Djibril Camara to stake a claim for inclusion in France’s 2016 squad. Many observers were disappointed that Danty didn’t make the World Cup squad. Danty, 5ft 11 and 15st, has often been compared to Bastareaud, but that does the Parisian a disservice. Danty is quicker and has softer hands, and also spots opportunities a second or two faster.

Camara has the potential to be a star of the 2019 World Cup. Fast and aggressive he’s liked joining the line and when he does he takes some stopping.

But it was the pack on which Stade built their title success, and for the first time this season they showed against Clemont on Sunday signs they are rediscovering their bullying form. Rabah Slimani is fast developing into one of the most accomplished props in European rugby, and together with Laurent Sempere and Heinke Van der Merwe, steamrollered Clermont’s vaunted front-row. With Pascal Pape and Alexandre Flanquart in the second-row and a bruising backrow of gifted ballhandlers in Parisse, former Blue Bulls captain Jono Ross and Raphaël Lakafia, Stade’s scrum will present Munster with a formidable challenge.

The challenge for Stade meanwhile is to climb into the top six of their domestic league so that in May they are in position to defend their title in the Top 14 playsoffs. Have they the squad and the desire to do that while also launching a second front in Europe?

“I know that it’s absolutely imperative for us we start winning,” Quesada said last week.