the essential
Before the Top 14 semi-final and therefore before his injury, the international pillar of Stade Toulousain Cyril Baille spoke, for La Dépêche du Midi, of waiting seven years before winning a shield and his role in the evolution of this generation.
Friday evening in Marseille, part of the current Stade Toulousain squad could join in the club’s history certain players from the 1994, 1995, 1996, 1997 generation who won four Brennus shields. They won in 2019, 2021, 2023 and maybe 2024. And in this generation that we arbitrarily called the Dupont generation, there are not only players of the same age (27 years old) as the half of -melee.
There is, for example, a certain Cyril Baille (30 years old) who started much earlier in the first team (2012) and has only known the current golden age of the Stadium. So, since 2019, he has been enjoying: “We had a somewhat difficult transition. We experienced a bit of everything. It was a roller coaster. The shield in 2019 is a magnificent memory because we had spent seven years without winning anything It was also a pressure on the club, and we often said to ourselves: P…, we are going to be the only generation to have won nothing. In the end, we worked hard and today,. We don’t want it to end there.”
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Even if the 2012-2019 period was surrounded by doubts, it also, according to the left pillar, allowed us to grow: “There was the year 2016/2017 when we finished twelfth in the championship. That one, we tended to to forget it because we don’t want to remember it. This means that we also had years of struggle which allowed us to grow up, to ask ourselves the right questions and to move on. Before”.
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Move forward, go higher, for long-term construction. And a journey so far perfect in the final for this generation which has never lost one: “It’s true that there is this side so far where the story is beautiful because we have won all the finals that We had to play. It’s a good thing, of course, we worked for it, but we also had some luck in winning. With this experience of the finals, we know each other by heart. also say things even if sometimes it is not pleasant to hear we are also a little harsh between us and that is what means that today we manage to approach the matches well. training and all the young people in the club have a particular love for this club. So, it also makes things easier to have all the recruits who arrive, who blend directly into the collective and who are good. guys. It’s chemistry. And when you play with your friends, you want to go for the friend next door even more.”
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Today, at thirty years old, Cyril Baille is no longer the young player who joins an international squad. And suddenly, the roles were reversed. He fully assumes his status as an elder and accompanist with the young people: “We are lucky to have them because they really pull us up and I think this is one of the years where we have such a rich squad with the old ones and the young people who are arriving and they have a great state of mind. They have really pulled us up. We feel that we are also pushing hard. to support as much as possible as we were able to be supported with the oldest ones. I remember that Titi Dusautoir, Patricio Albecete, Florian Fritz, Yoann Maestri, they were guys who helped us a lot and on whom we could rely.
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In addition to focusing on his role as a player among the best left pillars in the world, the Haut-Pyrénées has therefore entered into the transmission with the young people. Which does not mean that he is in early retirement: “Even if they are already well established, you have to support them. You also need kindness. Because it’s not easy to be a young player because you you have a lot of things that are less forgiven than an elder. When you are young, you have everything to prove and you also have moments of doubt. We try to communicate with them to be a relay for the coaches, to help them. maximum so that they can progress as much as possible. In any case, in terms of what they show, they are really astonishing in the way they approach the matches and the performances they achieve every weekend. Proof that transmission is effective…
