the essential
After the South African heat and humidity, the people of Toulouse have had to face negative temperatures since their return to the Pink City. A situation that they are comfortable with.
After cooking, freezing. While they had prepared for a long time to simmer in the South African casserole of Durban to mitigate as much as possible the effects of their unprecedented journey, the people of Toulouse did not even have 48 hours to return to the fresh reality of the hemisphere North and plunge back into the winter left around ten days earlier. If we are to believe Antoine Dupont, this does not seem to have been a big problem.
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“I had it harder on the way out than on the way back,” confesses the scrum half. “The heat obviously is very hard to bear. The cold, you get used to it quickly and it’s less bothersome on the physiologically, I feel better here than last week.” A sensation which was clearly felt during Wednesday’s reunion in Ernest-Wallon’s ice cube. “I think most of the team felt good given the training which went well,” he says. “So I hope we will be in good shape on Sunday too.”
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“What does this lead to?”
In the “red and black” clan, however, some people who were cold only appreciated the thermal shock very moderately. “The return was more complicated but that’s my feeling,” laughs François Cros. “It’s tricky at this time to face more than 30 degrees of difference between there and here. In addition, we are We returned the week when it was very cold. We had tried to prepare for the hot conditions there but we were not prepared for the return to the cold (laughter). It was a bit unusual but we adapted.”
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By force of circumstances, even if the schedule and the constraints that such a trip generates inevitably make some people cringe. “If we look closely, we travel a day by taking three planes to play 80 minutes. And the same in the opposite direction to return home. We are not the first to have done it, we will not be the last to do so, but what does it lead to?, asks Thomas Ramos. This is really the question that I, personally, ask myself.
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Against the backdrop of the health of the main players in this sport: “They are thinking a lot at the moment about the protection of the players, patati, patata (sic)… Do we protect the players with trips like that? I don’t know…” To deal with this excess fatigue with the added bonus of bodies being tested by a match played in hot and humid conditions, the stadium staff therefore opted for a lighter week.
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“We have never trained so little”
“It was necessary to take care of the organisms,” admits Cros. With adaptation as the key word despite the anticipation which had pushed the Haut-Garonne staff to go and glean information left and right, among the first teams to have suffered the cast.
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“Honestly, it’s only the day you experience it that you realize that it’s delicate, that it’s still a strange journey,” admits Ugo Mola. The return, with the addition of frozen terrain, we forced us to postpone our training until the afternoon because unfortunately, we were not able to train on our playing areas in the morning.”
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Without forgetting the “small flu conditions and gastric problems” which affected the workforce. “We had a series of problems, but once again, neither more nor less than what the others had to experience,” the manager continues. “Except that when you experience it yourself, you find it very particular and very painful […] But once you have said that, there is a match to prepare for.” To receive in the eighth, you will also have to win it. Just to conclude almost perfectly a sequence of a month and a half where “we didn’t never so poorly trained.”
