La Journée de Détection

I left Edinburgh by myself on a 5.50 flight with the aim of meeting my Dad in Gare du Nord station that evening. He was taking the Eurostar from London. So we eventually met up after I had got on and then swiftly off two wrong trains at the airport which were supposed to take me into the Gare du Nord.

While waiting for him I bought the French rugby newspaper, Midi-Olympique. It says a lot for rugby in France, and particularly in the Midi region (the mid to south) that they dedicate a whole bi-weekly newspaper to it. This certainly whetted my appetite. We got on the subway which took us south. I think it was south, if it wasn't south it would be north, but I'm sure it was south. I would love to say what this subway train took us through but it was dark. Anyway, we ended up at la Croix de Berny, stumbled about in the rain for a few minutes and then found our Hotel, the worthy but dull Hotel de Berny. We got to bed at a horribly late time, nervous about entering the total unknown.

Except it wasn't that unknown. It soon became apparent that a rugby trial is a rugby trial, whether it is for Edinburgh under-16 at Inverleith or Racing-Metro in Paris. Some boys knew each other, chatting away quite happily. Some had a ball and were passing it around in the same way that all teenage rugby players do. There were obvious differences: the way everyone shook hands, even the little 5 year old brothers; some were kissing. 'We're really in France now'. There was also the smell of the first Gauloise of the morning wafting around this dingy sporting complex where the club US Metro reside and which is now the training centre for Racing.

I joined a queue, asserting my British-ness in a foreign land. One old gentleman in a tracksuit came up to me, recognised me as the foreigner (mainly due to my SRU tracksuit - first impressions and all...) and said something which was mainly incomprehensible...'ahhh le scot!'

The usual pre-trial changing room awkwardness was there. Out we went to convene in a little stand. It was freezing. We split up into forwards and backs - I could work out where to stand myself, wholly due to my size relative to those around me. They made teams and we played some little 7 a side games across the pitch, with little structure. I suppose they wanted to see our skills. I got stuck-in, trying to play 10 though there were not many positions being played. I often ended up piling into scrum-half as everyone who thought they were a forward just HAD to pile into the ruck. This improved as we went on.

Then everyone was split up into just 2 teams of 15 players, we were playing a proper match. It's amazing how those players who I thought weren't much cop actually started to play when this happened. Je ne sais quoi perhaps... Basic skills were fairly poor but everyone ran hard and straight and knew what their roles were. I always knew how important communication was for a stand off but only now did I fully realise how much I said or wanted to say. Calling for the ball left and right off my scrum half became 'gauche' or 'droite' and my English/Edinburgh accent made me stand out like a sore thumb, apparently. My wishes for the ball to be transferred wide to the far touchline resulted in me looking round and pointing, waving my arm in that general direction. My idea to run a dummy-switch, pop - a fairly standard move across the world - resulted in me acting out a strange role-play to my centres where I played every part. The opposition must have been licking their lips in anticipation of where the ball would go. We still broke through their line.

We then did some kicking, where one coach refused the use of the end over end punt! Place-kicking was okay and that brought the trial to an end. I had understood what most of the coaches wanted in their directions, often through just knowing what a rugby coach says at certain times...

I had made one friend who was keen to translate everything for me and another who just kept smiling and repeating 'Dan Parks', which is really not the insult it used to be. Safe to say I was quite pleased with how I had done, scoring a couple and breaking several times.

We got back on our subway a chuffed pair with our morning's work and boarded our flight back home, with Paris now a definite, realistic option regarding next season.