Valence Romans lost to Aurillac (18-13) with four yellow cards and one red on the clock. Enough to provoke the cold anger of Fabien Fortassin, manager of VRDR.
Fabien, what is your first reaction to this more than frustrating defeat?
We did everything not to win the match, I cannot accept this defeat. We completely scuttled ourselves, it's the easiest match we've had to play since the start of the season, we offered them on a platter… I'm trying to think about what I'm saying because if I let me go, I'm going to be very mean and that pisses me off. We can't let games go by that are reaching out to us, we took yellow cards due to the quality of the opponent, but the others… It's disturbing because many worked hard, but a few individuals weighed us down .
Did your team lack intelligence in this meeting?
I was a professional for fifteen years, I didn't run fast, I wasn't good at bodybuilding, but I was lucky enough to be a professional because I played with my brain. The most important muscle is the brain. You can imagine that the speech at the break was focused on discipline and I am not going to remind you of the start of the second half… This match scenario erases all the positive points. We took a nice slap in the face, if we don't win matches like that where are we going to win? Some decided it was more interesting to have a competition of hormones and testosterone but I am not a trainer who rewards that. Maybe I'm too nice to the players, I forgive easily but between the stupid mistakes added to the fact that we got run over in melee I can't accept that…
With this enormous indiscipline, do you think that the intervention of a referee in your staff could rectify some mistakes?
Honestly I don't see what a referee would have changed, it's just lucidity and intelligence. We can have a lack of lucidity, especially at the front line level, between the scrum, the touchline, the game… I am rather understanding, but when they are fresh players, it is more disturbing.
In what state did you find the players at the end of the meeting?
I went straight to the bus to calm down otherwise I was going to be very hard. I have seen very little of the players, we have to be aware that we are playing at the bottom of the rankings and that meetings against direct opponents are important. We can't just rely on the defensive bonus but I'm proud of the majority of the behavior. If there is a really good team facing us we must take fifty, we have match statistics which mean that we must never take a point. Conversely, with a little lucidity, I think the outcome of the match would have been different.
Despite everything, your three-quarters were dangerous throughout the game. Are you going to build around this area?
Indeed, our offensive animation was rather coherent, but we never doubted the quality of our players. We gave ourselves the opportunity to be dangerous, we managed to find spaces even at 13 against 15, defensively we stood together and it's difficult because all the ingredients were there to win the match. It's very hard, everything is destroyed by individual mistakes. In high-level sport, it's the brain that controls everything.
