Life can be well done. For the coldest day of the week this Saturday, the San Isidro Club, which is hosting the French team throughout its tour in Argentina, had planned a welcome asado. The smell of wood fire and meat even caught the visitor’s nostrils from 11 am. But before sitting down to eat and then moving on to a day and a half of rest, it was necessary to go through seventy minutes of training on the pitch and weights, front and three-quarters separated.
An intense and extended session with some very specific objectives described by William Servat: “We worked on the beginnings of cells to try to create attack forms and build our game on collective forms. And within this collective, we tried to perfect the details of our launches and the touch, the movements after the touch and within all that, of course, to give meaning to the cells at the start of the rucks, by trying to understand why we had activity in the rucks and what we were trying to do there. Giving meaning is a bit of the theme of these training sessions.” Where we could see in particular that an angry Posolo Tuilagi, well supported by Ibrahim Diallo, could rush twenty meters, like in a video game, and change four “friendly” defenders into key rings to finally score under the posts .
Georges-Henri Colombe spared after head collision
A stunning action which reminds us that the French team did not cross the Atlantic for an Erasmus stay. “To make sense is to understand why we came on tour, recalled the coach in charge of the forwards. And of course, being somewhere proud to represent your country.”
A sign of the commitment in this session before Sunday’s rest, La Rochelle pillar Georges-Henri Colombe had to leave his teammates after a head clash with Tuilagi. Restrained at the end, Servat wanted to be reassuring: “We wouldn’t be smiling as much if we had already injured a right pillar during our training. This is not worrying. It was towards the end of the session. We simply preferred to manage it. We’re coming out of jet lag, we’ve just done two days of training with a little intensity nonetheless. It was more judicious and humane to have a form of regulation with Georges-Henri. »
Les Bleus will face the Pumas in two test matches, on Saturdays July 6 and 13, at 9 p.m. (French time), and Uruguay on July 10 at 7 p.m.
