TOP 14 Drilldown: Popelin the 10 O'Gara ordered. Toulouse hot on double-double trail

And then there was one. After four rounds of the Top 14 campaign, Toulouse are the only side yet to lose a game.
TOP 14 Drilldown: Popelin the 10 O'Gara ordered. Toulouse hot on double-double trail

La Rochelle's Pierre Popelin runs with the ball and scores a try during the French Top 14 rugby union match between La Rochelle and Biarritz at the Marcel Deflandre Stadium in La Rochelle, western France, on September 25, 2021. (Photo by XAVIER LEOTY/AFP via Getty Images)

Mon, 27 Sep, 2021 - 09:24
James Harrington

Four matches into the season is not the time to predict how the championship will play out - but it’s hard, right now, to look beyond the defending champions.

They didn’t have it all their own way against an inspired Clermont on Sunday, far from it, but they found it in them to win comfortably enough in the end. As statements go, it was as clear as they come. Toulouse are thinking of a double-double.

Stade Francais and La Rochelle, the Top 14’s only winless sides heading into the weekend, had points they needed to prove, too. And they did - the hard way and the emphatic way respectively.

How they stand 

Thirty-five tries were scored on the fourth of a 10-match unbroken opening block of games, while the weekend’s seven referees brandished seven yellow cards and one red - the same as last week.

And the table looks like this after the weekend’s games.

New Ten on the Block 

The headlines for La Rochelle’s first win of the season - justifiably enough - focused on scrum-half Tawera Kerr-Barlow’s first-half hat-trick, as Ronan O’Gara’s side ran in nine tries to beat Biarritz 59-17.

But, with the Rochelais at the head of a pack of Top 14 clubs prowling the marketplace for new fly-halves, the performance of summer signing Pierre Popelin, from Vannes, deserves a mention.

The 26-year-old Popelin is a fly-half by training and inclination, but started his La Rochelle career with two outings at fullback, after switching positions in the ProD2. His move back to out-half against Biarritz, in preference to Plisson, was almost exactly what O’Gara ordered.

“We need him, there's a lot of competition here," O’Gara said recently. The coach - who knows all about 10-play - added: “I see him more as a 10, but he knows how to adapt. He has a lot of ambition - when he plays instinctively he is a great player.” 

It’s clear that, despite starting the weekend 13th in the table, there’s no panic at Marcel Deflandre. It was also very quickly apparent that Biarritz - who lost prop James Cronin to injury half-an-hour into the game - weren’t about to spring a surprise.

Stade stand up at last 

Like La Rochelle, Stade Francais headed into round four without a win. Like La Rochelle, they corrected that anomoly with a 34-10 home win over a previously unbeaten and surprisingly clumsy Castres.

But they did it the hard way. The game started badly as prop Paul Alo-Emile was sent off in the third minute for a dangerous tackle. Rather than ruining the match, it had the effect of lighting a fire under the Parisians.

They were red-hot in defence - aided, undoubtedly, by the visitors’ own indiscipline - and rediscovered, for this match at least, the art of attack. And they weren’t helped by the referee, who spotted a knock-on no one else could see to deny Sekou Macalou what looked to be a gimme first-half try.

Centre Alex Arrate said afterwards: “We were criticised a lot after our first three matches. We understood, because our performances were disappointing. But when we analysed our performances, we saw we were capable of creating things.

“We haven't changed much. Now, we're not going to get carried away.” 

The messaging out of Jean Bouin is clear - Stade are better than their performances so far. That remains to be seen: opponents Castres were poor enough to make a home win relatively straightforward.

Their next three games feature a tough trip to Brive, a home match against Clermont and a long awayday to Perpignan. What happens in those three matches will go a long way to defining their campaign and their attitude towards their Champions Cup challenge.

Ever-changing Brive flatter to deceive on the road 

Halftime appearances at Stade Chaban Delmas, where Bordeaux hosted Brive on Saturday, were deceiving. The visitors were leading 10-9 - but it was a lead they scarcely deserved at the end of a tediously scrappy opening 40.

“The score was misleading at half-time,” Brive’s fullback Thomas Laranjeira admitted candidly afterward. “We fed on their mistakes to get ahead but we never managed to hold the ball long enough to seriously threaten them and play our game.” 

And so it proved. Ben Lam touched down twice in five mid-second half minutes after Brive backrow Kitione Kamikamica was sin-binned, as Bordeaux woke up to the hint of a threat of a home defeat. The hosts scored 20 unanswered points to win 29-10 and at least mitigate some of the disappointment of perma-grumpy coach Christophe Urios.

Brive boss Jeremy Davidson has elected for regular squad rotations in this opening block of games. He made 10 changes to the side that lost big at Montpellier a fortnight ago, and had swapped-out 12 for Saturday’s trip to Bordeaux.

Brive have targeted a top eight finish. Home wins alone won’t be enough to hit that mark - they won three times on the road last season, and finished 11th with 51 points in a season in which 66 points got you eighth. Much hinges on Davidson’s early season chop-and-change gamble.

On the plus side, they confirmed 22-year-old Enzo Herve had extended his stay at the club in a video that could only be made in France...

Good Racing, bad Racing 

For 15 glorious minutes at La Defense Arena, Racing 92 were unstoppable.

And then they weren’t.

It’s almost as if, after the prodigious Ibrahim Diallo scored their third try in the 13th minute - a highlight-reeler if ever there was one - they switched off.

Racing scored just three more points in the remaining 65 minutes of the game, allowing Lyon to come unacceptably close to stealing the win at the death.

It ended 24-20 - with Racing perhaps fortunate that the referee thought nothing of a Hatton Gardens-level breakdown robbery 5m from their line after the 80 minutes were up. But Lyon will long rue that opening 15.

King Henry Antoine Hastoy’s final destination may not be officially known yet - it’s La Rochelle - but it has been confirmed that he will leave Pau at the end of the season.

We also know head coach Sebastien Piqueronies is on the hunt for a replacement for his star player, around whom he had wanted to build a team.

But he may already have at least part of the solution to his fly-half problem already in this player.

Ex-Leicester player Zack Henry kicked 13 of Pau’s 23 points as they edged Montpellier 23-22, despite losing the try count four to two - and needing the visitors’ Anthony Bouthier to miss a difficult after-the-hooter conversion after Marco Tauleigne had scored his second try on debut.

A clearly happy Piqueronies indicated the scale of the job ahead. "We are cruelly lacking in realism and efficiency in key areas, but we manage to create chances. We’re getting closer.

“We are where we expected to be in the team rebuild. But we have to speed up."

Jaminet outkicks old friend Carbonel 

Saturday’s late Top 14 match was not exactly primetime TV friendly, as Perpignan beat Toulon 12-9 in the first tryless match of the season.

Not that the newly promoted hosts will care much for the opinions of disappointed casual TV viewers. They are two for two at home this season, equalling after four matches their total number of wins from their last Top 14 adventure back in 2018-19.

This was a victory built on upfront grit. One scrum on the hour - which became three points for the hosts - firmly turned the game in the hosts’ favour.

France fullback Melvyn Jaminet slotted the penalty to level the scores. Seven minutes later, he fired over his fourth of the night to take Perpignan into the lead for the first time, and overtake friend and former age-grade Toulon team-mate Louis Carbonel in their personal points battle.

The result also highlights an ongoing and increasingly serious issue for Toulon. The Var side have not won a match on the road in any competition since February 20th - and have only won three times away from home in a year. This is far from the record of a side with play-off ambitions.

Worse, they could have stolen the game, only for Gervais Cordin to fail to hang on to an admittedly poor pass with the tryline beckoning.

Dupont and Ntamack the difference 

If Saturday’s primetime match was enjoyable only for old forwards who revel in misery, Sunday night's game between Toulouse and Clermont at a sell-out Stade Ernest Wallon was a joyous, crazy-mad ride of French rugby legend.

Clermont had Toulouse rattled for long periods - proving their lowly league position is an aberration. Former Toulouse scrum-half Sebastien Bezy, now in Clermont-yellow, largely had the better of Antoine Dupont. And old timer Camille Lopez often made Romain Ntamack look ordinary.

The visitors nearly beat Toulouse at their own game. But the trick to even playing Toulouse at their own game is being able to stop Toulouse doing it, too. Clermont almost did it - but not quite.

They didn’t manage it when Ntamack latched on to Dupont’s oh-so-sweet chip over the defence to score the hosts’ first try. And they didn’t manage it when Dupont and number eight Selevasio Tolofua cooked up a 70th-minute move off the back of a scrum for the former to score the game-deciding try.

Clermont coach Jono Gibbes acknowledged the gap between the two sides at the end of the 27-15 defeat: “We are making progress but we still lack consistency. Playing Toulouse is an opportunity to see the level we have yet to go against a team that has just won two titles.” 

Whether he recognised it or not, he was also highlighting the distance between Toulouse and every other Top 14 club.

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