The Bordeaux team wanted to make history. They did it, but in the worst possible way. No one had been outclassed in a final to this extent since the creation of the French championship. A nightmare for a team that probably ended up on its knees. Their season didn’t deserve this.
Disappointed and melancholic supporters hanging around on Boulevard Michelet, a delegation of 300 people caught in the celestial turbulence. This is how the best season in UBB history ended, with a nightmare. The supporters lowered their voices around the 15th minute and lowered their banners to half-mast: “In the end, most of the Toulouse residents spoke to us in a tone of fair play and elegance, like: “Sorry about you!” Only a small minority came back to entertain us to the tune of: “And where are they, and where are they…” Some people wanted to fight, but in the end nothing happened.”confides Adrien, who had crossed France from the South-West to the South-East in a C3, leaving after work at 1 p.m., the car left near a Marseille metro station that he found by chance, in a Marseille suburb he didn’t know.
Seven and a half hours in the car to swallow a bitter plonk: “But I haven’t forgotten the rest of the season and I didn’t want to miss an event which was historic in any case. I had never seen a Bordeaux club in the final. But the situation could have been even worse. The Girondins are not yet relegated to the National, they have obtained a stay of proceedings from the DNCG. It’s encouraging, isn’t it? he confided to us before rushing into the last metro, without knowing where he was going to sleep. “Do you know a Formula 1 near the highway?”
A return to Bordeaux in the form of an ordeal
The UBB and its supporters experienced the first final of their young existence as a humiliation, nine tries to zero. Never has a team been so crushed at the end of a season. This is the fruit of the cruelty of the Top 14 format which, for historical reasons, must necessarily end with the final stages. The 2024 vintage will suffer from this terrible paradox, a cheerful season marred by an atrocious final blow. Without losing his calm, Yannick Bru shared a message of contrition as the coach of the Brazil football team, outclassed at home by Germany, did in 2014: “For all this, I apologize to our supporters who have given us so much this year. I don’t want the players to apologize because they gave their best all season, but this final tarnishes the image of our club. And we are a little sorry about that.”
We saw the manager, a Toulouse native, come to support his captain Maxime Lucu, who was very affected at the final whistle by this staggering setback, like a punch to the stomach: “I told him that he shouldn’t cry and that he had to know how to recognise when the opponent is way above him. I told him that in the end, it was better to be outclassed in the final than to be beaten 29-28 on a questionable refereeing decision. We were outclassed today, that’s undeniable. We weren’t invited, but I think that at the end of the match, it wasn’t really the UBB that you saw. The players were bruised, they had let go in their heads and Toulouse was euphoric.”
Maxime Lucu, always available, came to explain his emotional upheaval, the polar opposite of the joy that had gripped him at the end of the semi-final, when he threw himself into the crowd of supporters gathered in the stands . “You play in a final, you dream all week about lifting the Shield. I didn’t want to think about these things this week because it’s putting pressure on yourself. I gave everything and I wanted to take the club to a title of French champion. Losing like that hurt me a lot. The season was nervous, there were a lot of things, the World Cup, the 6 Nations… Finishing here, like that, is. difficult to accept. Today, I wanted to be rewarded and that wasn’t the case.”
We couldn’t not think about the end of the 2023 season, when the Bordelais were eliminated in the semi-final. They were almost self-managed, with collaboration between the management players and the Charrier-Laïrle duo who had survived the dismissal of Christophe Urios. It was clear that both parties had put their egos aside to keep up appearances and preserve the best interests of the club. But the atmosphere remained deleterious. In 2024, Bordeaux did better, a sign that the climate was much calmer. “Yannick brought us a lot this season. I came back from a very complicated period, you know that very well, and the words he said, everything he did for me during the season, it made me happy. got back in the saddle and it proved to me the man I was. He told me not to lower my head., continued Maxime Lucu.
And as if that were not enough, the entire delegation had to drink the chalice to the dregs. The people of Bordeaux had therefore planned to return home as quickly as possible, no matter what. But this night-time flight also turned into a disaster, one galley after another. The planes were unable to land in Mérignac because of the storms that had broken out in the Gironde sky. In a terrible irony of fate, at around 5:30 a.m., they were diverted to… Toulouse, from where they had to charter a bus to return home by road. One can imagine the state of their bodies and morale after such an odyssey, worthy of a tragicomedy.
Is it possible to be champion by going through the play-offs?
Could we imagine this defeat being so massive? During the week, the most pessimistic supporters and observers spoke of the forty-point mark as if to ward off fate. But fifty-nine was beyond belief, even the hottest Toulouse fan would not have dared to ask for so many. In these kinds of circumstances, we immediately think of the syndrome of the team which is experiencing its first final and which would be happy to be there.
Another childhood illness was considered, that of the very special week. Experienced coaches such as Ugo Mola have mentioned it, a final week is a week where there is little training, especially with a match scheduled for Friday, a week where players are in demand from all sides (sometimes for places). This results in a very special atmosphere, not easy to combine with the search for optimal performance. Yannick Bru rejected this idea: “No, there was a lot of calm during the week. The group was determined to do something big.” Another member of staff we met near the bus, when all the players were getting off, told us: “I feel the players are ready, the last training sessions were impressive.” Like all Bordeaux residents, he wanted to believe in it, carried by a season rich in exploits, it’s true, but still too chaotic.
Others put forward a series of complications which had degenerated into a stressful soap opera, the injuries to Matthieu Jalibert, Mateo Garcia and Ben Tameifuna for example (read on page 22). Was the group’s performance diminished?
It is also recalled that the Bordeaux team had one day less than their opponents to prepare for this final, six days instead of seven. And if we remember that they played their play-off against Racing on a Sunday evening (June 8), we realize that the Bordeaux team had to play three matches in twelve days. Opposite, the Toulouse team, exempted from the play-off, had played three in twenty days, and they had the leisure to play their last two matches of the regular season (La Rochelle and Lyon) with a largely renewed team. President Laurent Marti seemed to share this thesis of a Toulouse in full possession of its means against an exhausted opponent.
This is undoubtedly what pushed Yannick Bru to deliver to us in conclusion this sentence heavy with meaning and rich with a pressure that he inflicted on himself: “In the end, we lost the arm wrestling match; we even had our wrists broken under the table. […] It’s difficult to compete with a Formula 1 team like that by going through the play-off… To hope to beat Toulouse in the final, you have to qualify directly for the semi-finals, in my opinion.”
