The early red card conceded by the Montalban winger made the task of the Grenoble leader easier in his quest for an offensive bonus, despite an unsuccessful collective performance.
We might as well say it straight away: there was not long a match on Thursday evening, on the lawn of the Stade des Alpes. Time for Josua Vici to land, a full quarter of an hour after having flattened his team’s first try, a cuff from behind to the poor Isère flanker Victor Guillaumond… Enough to earn the latter a definitive exit due to concussion and Tarn-et-Garonne winger an indisputable red card, which left little doubt as to the outcome of the debates… The paradox? It is that if the FCG took advantage of its 60 minutes of numerical superiority to logically win with the offensive bonus point, the leaders of the championship displayed expressions as demanding as they were unsatisfied at the end of the meeting, despite their five tries scored. “We wanted five points at the start of the match and we got them, so it’s not that bad even if, when they received their red card, we struggled to do things in order, scried number 8 Hanru Sirgel. I think we like to give ourselves handicaps to come back better. We start slowly before finishing better, but we’re going to have to work on these first ten minutes if we want to be even better.” “It’s been several matches at home where we had to take a maul in the gu… to enter the match, lamented Captain Romain Fusier. This was also the case against Colomiers, against Brive… So, in the locker room at half-time, we said to ourselves that we had to respect them and also respect us. Before playing “baballe”, we had to put the essential elements in place, that is to say the ground game, the collisions, the rucks, the fundamentals of rugby, to be able to then put our game in place, which is what “We did well in the first ten minutes of the second period.” Just enough, in short, to bring up to date the “I came, I saw, I conquered” by Julius Caesar: the people of Grenoble came, saw and conquered. End of story…
Montauban with its values
Which, however, would not be complete if we did not highlight here the great resistance of the Montalbanais who, although defeated for the fifth time in a row, showed that they had plenty to hope for better days. “When we returned from the locker room, we had a bad outing and we took two tries straight away, summed up manager Sébastien Tillous-Borde. It hurt us but overall, we have nothing to be ashamed of. Even at fourteen, we stayed in the game, it proves that the team is not at the bottom of the bucket. This is good: we have a meeting next week which will be ultra-important, against Valence-Romans, where we will have to play a great rugby match.” There is no doubt that at fifteen for more than twenty minutes, the Sapiacains will have the means.
