It’s always good to start the year off on the right foot. Dax did it but the same can’t be said for CAB. For Brive, it’s quite the opposite. We will end up believing that there is a mental blockage in this club as soon as we have to play away and that we have to assume our status. It is time to turn words into action.
Dax is the scratching team of this championship and confirms its last season. It is no longer a surprise but it is refreshing because of what it brings. She has absolutely no fear when it comes to challenging the big guys in Pro D2. Brive bites the dust again in the Landes.
The positive points
The counter in touch. Friday in Dax, not much went in the right direction for the CAB. All sectors have suffered. A sector has survived in the collective debacle: the counter in touch. We know that Brive has been effective for several seasons and even if Courtney Lawes was absent, Brive recorded the return of Sasha Gué. Absent and injured since the trip to Nevers on the 3rd day, the 3rd row is effective in touch. If his first catch was not assured, he made up for it on the opposing throws. Ford steals 3 balls in a row and is poison on the first block. Retief Marais, at the back of the lineup, will also steal a ball. In total, Dax loses 5 balls on his throws and therefore so many interesting ammunition to play with. For his return to competition, Sasha Gué steals 3 balls and makes a tackle which avoids a dacquois try. Good recovery for the 3rd wing line of the CAB.
The negative points
Always the same thing. When will this team and this club learn from their past mistakes? From the moment Brive moves to a well-ranked team, it’s always the same story. Brive very rarely meets expectations. Once again, Brive announces that it is moving to Dax with ambitions but these ambitions disappear very quickly. We always see the same scenario repeated game after game. If CAB wants to play in the Top 14, he cannot afford to repeat this type of away match. He will have to perform well away from home and start to assume this favorite status. This status is assumed at home but not outside. This team is far too much on alternating current, at half time to have certainty about the rest of the season.
An offensive nothingness. The playing conditions were different from last season but the nature of the match was the same. We see a Dax team confident in its game and the game plan put in place by the staff and we see a Brive team who doesn’t really know where they are going. Jeff Dubois gives another tactical lesson to Pierre-Henry Broncan. The Dacquois game plan was simple: play with the foot in the axis (and avoid offering touches to the CAB as much as possible) and play with the hand as usual because it is the team’s style of play and it also makes it possible to move a dense team. In Brive, we know plan A: conquest, forward play and axial play. If plan A doesn’t work, that’s where it gets complicated because there are no backup plans.. Regardless of the name of the head coach (Godignon, Davidson, Collazo, Broncan), the CAB is far too stuck in this game “from the past” and cannot develop a modern game. It’s like in the NBA, you are a team that plays inside, close to the rim while everyone else plays outside and shoots as many as 3 points. As soon as a team moves the ball, we see a Brive team in difficulty. It’s almost constant away and it’s in sequences at home. Brive must really ask itself the right questions because with a Top 14 objective in the short term, it is not with only a set of forwards that this will happen.
The defense. In attack, Brive did not get a single clear testing opportunity. In defense, Brive took on water. So, certainly not in terms of the scoreboard and the number of tries conceded but rather in general. In a match where there were no tackles every second either, there was a lot of waste. And particularly near Brive. Dax has an 88% tackle success rate with 10 missed tackles out of 81. In Brive, both the percentage and the number are frightening: 75% and 27 missed tackles out of 106. 7 players (Usarraga, Gué, Marais Carbonneau, Bosch, Moroni, Ferté) missed between 2 and 4 tackles each. The second try comes directly from a missed tackle by Marais at the edge of a ruck. Gatelier’s “almost” try comes after a monstrous breakthrough from Néné who breaks three tackles in the same action. It’s not possible to get through this much. Last season, Pierre-Henry Broncan was surprised not to see a defense coach. This season, there are two who have a lot of work because it is a sector which has not been clean since the start of the season even if it has been better recently.
In conclusion
Traveling around Dax becomes an elephant graveyard because all the big ones fall there. On Friday, Brive fell again. Like last season, Brive took a lesson, both tactical and technical. The CAB seemed lost, without ideas, without desire, having great difficulty producing an attack that resembled something. Players sank like Léo Carbonneau and Taniela Sadrugu. Of course, Brive is still second in the standings but the gap is closing with the pursuers. Above all, and this is perhaps the most worrying, iThere are not really positive signs on the ground which show that Brive is one of the favorites for the climb and who can fight in the Top 14. Except for the beautiful words in front of the microphones.
Images : Canal+Sport
