Bordeaux ready to ‘tighten screws’ for Munster clash

Union Bordeaux Bègles' Head Coach Yannick Bru. Pic: Billy Stickland/Inpho

‘WE’LL have to play better if we hope to beat Munster,” Bordeaux manager Yannick Bru admitted after watching his side beat Ulster 43-31 at a sweltering Stade Chaban Delmas to set up a Champions Cup quarter-final against Munster.

“We were generous — and in the Champions Cup, when you’re generous, you can get punished. We have to tighten a few screws for Munster.

“The important thing is that, on Saturday, we have a chance to do better than last season, when we lost in the quarter-finals, but the intensity will be higher.”

Second row Cyril Cazeaux used Sunday’s wild and unbridled 11-try round-of-16 win to very publicly demonstrate his personal outrage at the common impression that Bordeaux are a team of backs supporting an inconsistent forward unit that has a propensity to go missing in action.

No one is about to pretend Cazeaux’s one-player performance creates a title-winning tight-five — and there was plenty in the collective performance of a rotated Bordeaux side for Munster analysts to pick apart this week – but it won the lock, more used to the hard places than the limelight, a deserved player of the match watch.

He is, by his own admission, a Cenobite of a player, first in line for the ball in the bad zones, where moving forward means running through defenders equally determined not to let him; and at the vanguard of the defensive set-up. 

His 15 tackles on Sunday were the most of any Bordeaux player. The four line breaks and 63 metres with ball in hand were the unexpected eye-catching bonuses that earned him the Tissot.

Damian Penaud, meanwhile, scored his 11th try of the tournament, bringing him level with Chris Ashton’s single-season record. He’s scored 20 times in 18 outings for Bordeaux and France this season, while opposite wing Louis Bielle-Biarrey — rested against Ulster, but set to return this weekend — has 26 from 22, including five in three Champions Cup outings.

Focus on the Bordeaux backline is easy to understand. Bielle-Biarrey and Penaud are worth the entrance fee by themselves. Add in Matthieu Jalibert, Yoram Moefana, Nicolas Depoortere, Romain Buros, and Maxime Lucu — with a side order of Enzo Reybier, Pablo Uberti, Joey Carbery, Mateo Garcia, Rohan Janse van Rensburg and Arthur Retiere — and there’s a bewildering number of combinations for attack coach Noel McNamara to tinker with.

The afternoon before the craziness at Chaban Delmas, Bru and his Bordeaux squad settled in to watch Munster beat La Rochelle some 200km or so up the A10.

The URC side were ‘impressive’, Bru said.

Scrum-half Maxime Lucu added: “We know they’ll take us on at the breakdown. They won a lot of turnovers against La Rochelle. Their ball carries, winning balls, making offensive tackles, double-teaming, slowing down rucks. That’s where they will target us. For the front eight, in the confrontation zone, it’s going to be tough — we’ve been warned.”

The breakdown was a clear and present weak point for the French side, who were turned over six times by Ulster. “It was below our standards,” Bru admitted. “It’s clearly an area of work, because it’s obvious Munster will come to break our defence.”

Lucu had another note of caution ahead of the first Champions Cup meeting between the two sides. “A big European team is arriving on Saturday. It’s up to us to show we’ve improved since last year.”

And that’s the point. Bordeaux have so much to prove. After 20 matches of last season’s Top 14, Bordeaux were sixth, with 49 points. They finished third, with 69 points, then battled past Racing 92 and Stade Francais to reach the final — where Toulouse put them very firmly in their place.

After 20 domestic matches in the 2024/25 campaign, they are second, with 65 points, currently hold a barrage-week bye — which, immediately after last season’s final, Bru said was vital to challenge the 2020s Toulouse hegemony — and are already just 81 behind their total points tally over 26 domestic matches last season.

They have six matches to score the four tries they need to overtake last season’s total of 80, and have a 70 percent win rate, compared to 58 percent last season.

Bordeaux’s season-on-season improvement is clear in the domestic numbers. But numbers don’t win titles, and they’re what the club craves more than anything.

Previous incarnations have tasted glory. Stade Bordelais won the French championship seven times between 1899 and 1911, while Club Athlétique Bordeaux Bègles lifted the title in 1969 and 1991.

But the post-merger Bordeaux-Bègles era trophy cabinet remains bare.

Last season’s Top 14 final was their first. They reached the last four in 2021, 2022, and 2023. They reached the semi-finals of the 2020/21 Champions Cup, too, a year after getting to the semis in the Challenge Cup. In 2011, they won promotion to the Top 14 behind ProD2 champions Lyon via a play-off victory over Albi.

They have a tricky domestic run-in — with home matches against La Rochelle, Castres and Vannes evenly distributed between trips to Pau, Montpellier and nearest-rivals Toulon. Even so, it’s easier to see them finishing in the top two than out of it.

Last season, like this one, they finished top of their Champions Cup pool to book their place in the knockout phase, comfortably won their round-of-16 match against Saracens — but then came unstuck in the last eight in an 83-point thriller at Chaban Delmas against Harlequins. 

It didn’t start there, but the manner in which the Quins’ pack dominated the Top 14 side in the set-piece on a hot April afternoon consolidated the flaky reputation of Bordeaux’s forwards.

Is there any surprise in the fact that recruitment for next season is forward-heavy?

But Bru doesn’t expect a quarter-final full-frontal failure this time. The coaches were quietly impressed with the forwards against Ulster.