Ronan O'Gara: This project was dying in my arms. Now it’s alive and kicking
PENSIVE: La Rochelle's head coach Ronan O'Gara before last weekend's penultimate Top 14 tie away to Montauban at Stade Sapiac in Montauban. Pic: Matthieu Rondel/AFP via Getty Images
It’s easy make metaphors, but at our local Rivedoux plage beach in Ile de Ré a gigantic 14-and-a-half ton whale washed up a few days ago. This giant was over 14 metres long, and experts deduced it had clearly been ailing for some time as it drifted to shore. Its demise made headline news here. All I was thinking is whether I should keep swimming around there.
Make of all that what you will, but the final round of the 10-month exhausting Top 14 regular season this weekend will leave a couple of big beasts on their backs for the summer. And La Rochelle, two-time European champion, might well be one of them.
This may be one of life’s few jobs where you want to keep postponing your summer break. All we want from Saturday night is not to finish it on vacation. Missing out on the play-offs in back to back seasons looks good on no-one’s curriculum vitae.
I had sought in vain to turn a project that was dying in my arms around into something that is now, unbelievably, appealing and exciting again. We are playing great rugby.
It’s been forced on us to some extent but how rewarding it is for the players to be open to trying something different and see it flourish in the way it has. Teething problems for sure, but from where we were at the turn of the year to where we are now is a borderline miracle.
We were 10th and watching aghast from the coaching box at home to Lyon as we went 0-31 down, I felt as helpless as that bloated, floating carcass. We lost that one 28-44 but it can always get worse. In Castres, they had three players in the bin, and we had a scrum, and seven backs v four backs advantage to rescue the game and blew it. If that happened to Mallow U12s, you’d be speechless.
I thought we were dead. That’s the price we pay for having the equivalent of a small hospital on injured reserve for a block of the season but excuses, legitimate or otherwise, don’t wash when you’re not winning. Ask Leo and Jacques at Leinster.
The most important learning to take is you can have the master plans but unless you have competition among your group, you’re a dead man walking. And it’s hard to have competition for places when you have 28 players out injured.
Hence, three months ago, we’d have bitten your arm off for a chance of the play offs going into the final round of games. We have won five on the bounce but a series of very unlikely events last weekend took La Rochelle’s destiny out of our own hands.
The change in perspective between leaving Montauban with a 71-15 bonus win last Saturday and coming into training on Monday morning was stark. Two things happened Sunday night that flipped everything and that no-one (or very few) expected.
Bordeaux Begles, lying in the final play-off spot of sixth, picked up a losing bonus point away to Toulon which kept them a point (69 to our 68) ahead of us. Fair enough. Far worse, fifth-placed Racing 92 got a bonus point win away to Clermont to go to 70 points, which no one but the Parisiens could have foresaw.
That hasn’t just changed the dynamic, it has changed everything. If they’d won at Clermont with four points, they would have only been a point ahead of us, and they have Toulouse in the final round Saturday night. Now they are two ahead and a win of any description against the leaders – who knows what they will bring to Paris – keep them out of our reach. If Racing win and Bordeaux win with a BP, we are goosed.
Pau will beat Montauban to secure fourth – what a story they have been this season – and it’s two from Racing, Bordeaux and ourselves for the remaining two play-off positions. Sharks in the water.
A brief explainer: The top two go straight to the semis, with 3rd playing 6th and 4th playing 5th for the right to join them.
All this is predicated on us doing our business at home to Stade Francais who have had an excellent season and lie third, only on points difference behind Montpellier. Their target is second, and a direct route into the semi-finals. Montpellier are away to Lyon.
Those games last Sunday night didn’t finish until 11.30 so the head is spinning going to bed, and not a whole lot more settled going in Monday to debrief on the Montauban win and assess the week’s agenda. Of all the scenarios you’d envisaged parsing, Racing winning away with a BP wasn’t one.
A tiny shaft of light? If there is a team you’d think could win away from home in the Top 14, it’s Toulouse, but we have to take care of our own business as best we can. I only have to take it back to this time last year when we went to Pau with the play offs in our own hands and we blew up. Strange things happen on the last day.
We don’t have 28 injuries any more but we are still without key leaders and frontliners. But you know what’s great? The fact that injury stuff is no longer the primary topic of conversation. We have moved on, it’s not an issue and in Week 26 we are alive.
The Top 14 is where you go in Europe to get your rugby kicks. The gap to the rest is increasing. Is it about numbers? For sure. There are 27 professional teams across the Top 14 and Pro D2, so it’s a bad day when you don’t have five for every position - in Ireland that would be a miracle with four provinces.
But there’s still an under appreciation of the principles of play in France. The fundamentals - the ruck is seen as an evil over here where is some places closer to home it’s a staple. The ruck is a way of slowing the game down, and certain coaches obsess over it. Each to their own but it eventually becomes a big weakness. In France they coach from Under 6 level not to go to ground - (standing game) they call it, or keeping the ball alive.
Bottom placed Montauban took 1,278 points in their opening 25 games and their curtain call at home was against us last Saturday. Even then, there is a noisy hullaballoo around the last home game of the season, as they say thanks and parade the lads who are leaving.
Even after such a difficult year the crowd were humming, and we were there expected to walk away with five points. You are trying to point out to players that this could be tricky given the circumstances, but their subconscious isn’t interested. Montauban will regroup for Pro D2 and will change half their squad looking to rebound.
People often wonder where would the Irish provinces rate in Top 14 terms. Obviously Leinster would be best equipped to compete, financially and with realistic expectation – they two aren’t mutually exclusive. But the physicality of the Top 14 is on a far higher plain than the URC.
Leinster have been the standard setters in Irish rugby for over a decade but they now are coming under an interesting amount of heat. Titles don’t come cheap but you have to be contending. There’s a lot of local talent in Leinster but it is still an unbelievably expensively-assembled squad.
Money never guarantees success but it demands you're there or thereabouts all the time. It's easy see why people are blasé about a URC semi-final after what happened them in Bilbao.
Munster would take it, I guess, though it seems to be comparing apples and oranges nowadays. I read Donal Lenihan’s assessment this week of where Munster are and what they need to do. There is no rugby man more in tune with Munster’s culture.
They could do worse than listen to him.
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