Toulon head coach: 'We have a hellish schedule. We’re not robots. We’re asked to play 11 months every year'
Toulon's head coach Pierre Mignoni. Pic: XAVIER LEOTY / AFP via Getty Images
“What do you want us to do?” head coach Pierre Mignoni demanded, after his experimental Toulon side lost 66-0 at La Rochelle in the final Top 14 match before the Champions Cup fortnight.
“When you have 19 players out … you use the resources you have, and that means bringing in academy players.”
Toulon travelled light to Stade Marcel Deflandre as Mignoni put many of his season’s eggs in a four-match basket before the Six Nations’ break: the crucial third and fourth Champions Cup pool phase games against Munster at Stade Mayol Sunday afternoon, then Gloucester at Kingsholm next Saturday evening; and the Top 14 games against Montpellier, at home, and Pau, at Stade du Hameau. The La Rochelle match didn’t factor in.
The coach probably could have gone harder at Deflandre — his ‘19 players out’ figure included a few rested for Munster and beyond as well as those in the infirmary.
He may even have picked a stronger squad last weekend had Toulon won their first Champions Cup outing in Edinburgh. We’ll never know, because December’s 33-20 defeat in what has turned into the tightest of Champions Cup pools narrowed the three-time champions’ route to the knockout-phase.
It’s clear Toulon want to go deeper into the tri-league tournament than last season’s quarter-final, and further into the Top 14 play-offs than the last four. After several years roaming the mid-table wilderness, it’s an understandable ambition for one of France’s biggest clubs.
Mignoni, therefore, decided he needed as many players as possible fit, firing and rested for the first of what he sees as a vital four-match mini-block for the club’s ambitions. His policy, for better or worse, was to effectively concede at La Rochelle, and give a host of academy players a taste of top-flight domestic rugby.
“We had to make choices — we made them, and I stand by them,” Mignoni insisted.
In part, the hope is that blooding so many young and inexperienced players will pay off in the longer term. It’s also another not-so tacit concession that rugby, especially in France, is a never-ending attritional feud with form, fitness and fatigue.
The answer is fewer games. But there’s no question of changing the Top 14, the powers that be insist. Champions Cup reform, however, is favoured by French clubs. Cutting the tournament to 18 teams to make it genuinely ‘elite’ has been suggested.
But back to more immediate concerns. The squad for tomorrow’s must-win Munster match will be big-name, big-game Toulonnais. France international prop Jean-Baptiste Gros returned to full training this week for the first time since the win over Bath in mid-December, while fullback Marius Domon is back after his brain injury.
Meanwhile, wingers Gael Drean and Setariki Tuicuvu, props Dany Priso and Kyle Sinckler, fly-halves Tomas Albornoz and Mateo Garcia, second row Dave Ribbans, backrows Charles Ollivon and Zach Mercer and Lewis Ludlum were among those spared the trip to La Rochelle.
They’ll all be rotated back in quickly over the next few pre-Six Nation weeks.
The price Top 14 fans paid for Mignoni’s longer ambitions was in the complete absence of primetime TV spectacle last weekend, as a young squad with 10 academy players and three making their senior debuts barely threw a punch in response to La Rochelle’s repeated attacks in a game that quickly became a little more than a glorified Sunday night lights training exercise.
The scale of the defeat has had French rugby pundits questioning standards in the domestic game, to run hand-in-hand with the long-running debate over the bloated Champions and Challenge Cup formats.
It was the eighth match of the Top 14 season alone in which one side had conceded 60 points or more, and the third of the 14th weekend, after Montpellier beat Bayonne 62-20, and Bordeaux scored seven tries and 47 points in 23 second-half minutes to finish 67-20 victors over Racing 92. The previous weekend, La Rochelle shipped 60 at Toulouse in a match watched by 33,000 at Stadium Toulouse and more than one million French viewers on pay-TV broadcaster Canal Plus.
Promoted ProD2 champions Montauban have been on the receiving end of three of the eight Top 14 60-plus point beatings — and have been within a converted try of three more. Nine times in 16 matches to date in all competitions, they have been on the wrong end of a 40-point plus scoreline.
Regional newspaper Sud Ouest this week pointed out that nearly 40% of matches have ended with one side scoring 40 points or more, while a margin of at least 25 points has been recorded in nearly 30% of Top 14 games this season.
And yet, the league remains very tight, with just six points separating third from 11th, and more teams passing the 30-point barrier earlier than ever. At what price, though?
The last word should go to Mignoni, as he appealed for change, or — at least — some understanding for his choice. “We have a hellish schedule,” he said. “We’re not robots. We’re asked to play 11 months every year. I can’t do anything about that.
“If you don’t like it, give me a salary cap, give me the resources to have three teams. Right now, we don’t have that. No one does.”
CONNECT WITH US TODAY
Be the first to know the latest news and updates
