After wearing down their South African opponent for more than an hour, the Castres managed to break the Bulls’ lock to pass five tries in fifteen minutes. Own.
It’s a new poster that kept Pierre-Fabre busy on Saturday evening; a match full of exoticism and novelty. This first confrontation between Olympic Castres and a South African team was surrounded by questions before kick-off. What would be the level of these “bulls” from Pretoria about whom we didn’t know much, in our latitudes? How were Jake White’s men going to digest the long journey to Occitania? Were these guys from the South going to succeed in acclimatizing to the Tarn winter which surrounded Castres on January 11?
Xavier Sadourny, who officiated for the first time as manager of Castres Olympique, was very pleasantly surprised by these new playing friends: “Honestly, I found the South Africans very well placed, very precise. In the first half, it was not us who had difficulty getting into the match but them who were very good in everything. They were doing a try on a carried ball and we didn’t see much of the ball for twenty minutes.”
Indeed, the fault was a lack of precision from the Castres and despite a well-constructed try from Geoffrey Palis, half-time was reached with a narrow score of 10 to 7 in favor of the CO. Very clever who, at that moment, could predict the apotheotic finale that the Blue and Whites were going to offer to some 9,800 enthusiasts who came to support them. But Xavier Sadourny had a plan. The manager continues: “We knew that the Bulls had not played for around three weeks and that they had the long journey to Tarn on their hands. We suspected that they were going to suffer physically at the end of the match. Already, in the first period, we took the upper hand in the melee even if we were not much rewarded. We were denser than them, it “hit” a little harder on our side. We had to insist and there were bound to be breaches. open up.”
An offensive festival
And what was supposed to happen. The physical superiority of the Tarnais ended up materializing on the scoreboard with five tries scored between the 65th and 80th minutes, including a hat-trick from winger Rémy Baget and two goals from Julien Dumora and Jack Goodhue. An offensive festival which brought Pierre-Fabre out of the torpor which had gripped him until then. In addition to being good for confidence, this recital was enough to give the Castres victory a pleasant magnitude for the “goal-average” (+39) which could preside over the moment of knowing who will finally extricate themselves from this phase of chicken. Because before this success for the Olympians, the Stade Français did the job by winning a crucial match on the pitch at Northampton, completely reviving the interest in this group 3. Castres will indeed have to succeed in bringing back something from their trip to Saracens to qualify.
Among the bad news, because there had to be some, the Castres lost their winger Geoffrey Palis, victim of a sprained ankle.
Senegal
