Too often connected to alternating current since the start of the season, the Checkers will have to show much more consistency in their matches to hope to escape the play-off place.
It was in the position of play-off that Valence-Romans spent the end-of-year holidays (fifteenth with ten defeats and five victories), quite far from the ambitions displayed at the start of the season by the staff and managers, who were do better than last year with an eleventh place. The consequence of a checkered first part of the championship for Fabien Fortassin’s team. Several recruits who arrived in the off-season are struggling to find their feet in the squad and provide added value, such as Welsh winger Owen Lane, Irish second row Darren O’Shea and Georgian third row Otar. Giorgadze and Ilia Spanderashvili.
But what is most striking and penalizing for the Damiers since the start of the season is their difficulty in producing complete performances over the entire duration of the matches, with periods of sluggishness having cost them several matches, at home. like outside. “What we lack today is this ability to be regular, to be constant. We are capable of doing sequences that academically I could rate 18 out of 20. And the next action, we don’t know why, we play 8 out of 20. The day we regularly play 15 out of 20, we will be much more effective, much more dangerous”deplores Fabien Fortassin. There is no shortage of examples, such as the end of matches against Béziers and Montauban or at Grenoble, the catastrophic first halves at Soyaux-Angoulême and Aix-en-Provence, not to mention the indiscipline at Aurillac.
“You have to want to take points everywhere”
These numerous air holes make the mid-season assessment even more frustrating. “Mathematically, we have two points less than last season at the same period. It seems to me that we competed with everyone, that we looked everyone in the eyes. Now, there is no only one truth is the ranking and we are fifteenth But there is a return phase to play with fifteen matches which will all be very important. know that we have the means and capacity We have to be much more demanding, much more aware that the margin is too small to allow ourselves to be at 70%. That’s not forgiving, when we are fully invested, we know how to do it. very good things. The very high level is consistency and knowing how to play matches at a high level, performing well weekend after weekend. This consistency was lacking in this first half of the season.
Morocco
