Already, we must congratulate La Rochelle, who had a great match, who were very opportunistic, especially on their first two tries. What we mainly lacked, for me, is our strong point, which is to say the ground game. We were completely dominated, I don’t know how many balls we lost – or that La Rochelle recovered. There was no match in relation to that and we found ourselves in great difficulty, we too were not able to score. We weren’t effective at all.
However, was the start of the match really to your advantage?
Yes, but we took two attempts against which hurt us very much. Despite that, we are at -9 (15-24, Editor’s note) at half-time and we tell ourselves that we must not fall into what they want, that is to say put you under pressure, play at home. But that’s exactly what we started to do in the second half. So we lost track a little on the strategy. In the first half already, we played too much without putting them under pressure, from 15 meters to 15 meters without being able to put aside this defense which is causing us a lot of problems. We were more in our hands but in the end, they were the ones who had the control… In the ground game in particular, where they were at the limit but very effective. The referee caught them 7 times in the first half, much less afterwards. Well… It was up to us to be much more precise.
“Against this team, you have to hold the ball, go much faster, be much more dynamic”
The Rochelais were also much more realistic.
It’s clear. I knew that this was a team that absolutely had to be prevented from coming to our camp because they are very clinical, very dense. And they were much better than us at that.
Did you lack character?
