Top 14 – Pau: a glimmer of hope for a knife match

They left yesterday Thursday for a nearly three-day course on the Basque Coast. The Palois are preparing for a new knife match at home. This time we will have to rule out Vannes, a direct rival in the race to remain after having experienced the same thing against Lyon during the last home outing of the Section Paloise.

The defeat in Toulon 56-25 obviously reinforced the image of Palois overwhelmed away from home and inevitably under the gutter at home.

Hooker Youri Delhommel explains to us: “Going on training like this, it allows everyone to be very focused for three days on this particular match. We will be one hundred percent. We will sleep two days together. Work calmly on the small details. The little videos that 'we have to do it off the field, we're going to do it together.'

The hooker knows well that Vannes, bottom of the ranking for its first season in the Elite, does not play in the same state of mind as Pau.

“We know that they are not giving up. They went to La Rochelle to win, they have nothing to lose and everything to gain by coming to us.” continues the hooker who undoubtedly fears the thunderclap, a local team which is becoming nervous, the Bretons who, conversely, are gaining confidence.

Beka Gorgadze absent since October 16

To write about Pau at this moment is to once again recall the string of injured people who populate its infirmary (Attisogbe, Rey, Kaulashvili, Whitelock, Capelli, Laporte, etc.) and the refrain is not new.

But be careful, Sébastien Piqueronies will finally be able to pull an ace up his sleeve, the third line center Beka Gorgadze will be on the attack for this meeting. Unless there is a last minute change, he will be on the scoresheet.

Finally, one would be tempted to say. Because the absence of the Georgian number 8 was really deplored in the bays of the Hamlet. He is so important in the game of the Section because of his sharpness and his accuracy. He was out at the start of the Pau-Castres match on October 16, injured in an ankle by a collision with an opponent, an unforeseeable event. And we understood everything that meant. Because without him, the Section is not quite the same team. And Luke Whitelock, who could replace him, is also injured for a long time.

Sébastien Piqueronies summed up his thoughts as follows after Mayol's discomfiture: “It’s not because we lost in Toulon that there will be more pressure against Vannes. We must deserve to survive in the Top 14.” Maybe the Section knows where it is, it doesn't think it's someone else. Maybe we call it the culture of maintenance.