USAP has not won in Toulouse since February 2013. This Saturday, at 4:30 p.m., the Catalans go to Toulouse with a little hidden hope but all the same in a position of outsiders against Toulouse deprived of their international. The USAP must also move on from Tommy Allan, Pietro Ceccarelli, Joaquin Oviedo, Ignacio Ruiz and Gela Aprasidze retained in their national teams, not counting long-term absentees (McIntyre, Dubois, Van Tonder and Tuilagi among others).
Third line Alan Brazo thinks the case is perhaps just a little more playable than usual : “Yes, it’s more playable, that’s for sure. Afterwards, we will face a team which remains very competitive. We saw this in particular last year, during the six nations matches, with a team similar to what we will face on Saturday, they won almost all their matches. So that perhaps increases the chances of making a move there, but we know that they are still great players in all positions. It remains Toulouse even if some speak of a B team or even a C team, it remains a very competitive team with high level players in all positions. We know that we have to play a great match and that, even with that, it doesn’t guarantee anything. It’s up to us to apply ourselves, to put into place everything we have seen, to be present in the commitment. And if there’s something that comes up, we’ll take it.”
Expected premiere for Max Hicks and returns to the back lines
USAP hopes at least not not come back from Toulouse with regrets as was the case during the match at Racing. The Catalans had fallen too far behind in the first half before believing in their chances of victory only to lose everything at the last second. For Alan Brazo, we must absolutely avoid repeating these errors: “We have to be 100%, we have to not have any weak moments or gaps in the match if we want to hope for something with these big teams. This is what happened to us at Racing where we had a bad start to the match and we know that against these teams, it’s not forgiving if you leave ten or fifteen points behind in twenty minutes, it’s fatal in Racing, in this case. was almost 25 points behind, It’s almost unrecoverable. We had a lot of regrets after this defeat. In Castres we also had regrets, in Bayonne too, so it’s up to us to give our best to avoid that again. if we have a great match, but at least we will have a little less regrets and it will be easier to digest.“
This weekend in Toulouse, USAP should include New Zealand second row Max Hicks on the scoresheet for the first time. For the past week, he has been training with the team and has rather pleasantly surprised Alan Brazo: “As you can imagine he doesn’t really speak French, it’s a bit early, but in any case, I think he had worked before arriving. The coaches must have sent him the sideline announcements or the game plan because on the first day of training, we started to explain it to him a little and we realized that he was aware of a lot of things, he integrated very quickly. He’s a great player and I can’t wait to see him in a match because training is still training, but in any case he’s a very good guy and always listening, he’s learning and we see that he wants to learn and that’s a good thing. I think he will bring a lot to the team.”
For this match in Toulouse, USAP can also once again count on wingers Ali Crossdale and Jefferson Joseph and centers Alivereti Duguivalu and Job Poulet. International pillar Giorgi Beria joined the group this Thursday morning and had a lighter training session.
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