Bring your 'sac de couchage', folks!

It’s been a slightly different week to normal. Team training was moved to Tuesday and Wednesday evenings and for the first time pretty much the whole squad is back fit again. We have lost a 2^nd row (the one with whom I made the blond hair pledge) to illness which is a real shame but apart from that our ‘1^st team’ should be on the pitch against Toulon.

I have allowed my weights to fall by the wayside as the season nears its end. This is not through a dislike of lifting weights but a shift in priorities. I’m nursing too many knocks (wrist and ankle) to push through weight sessions. I just do what I can to remain sharp, lots of short sprints with Serge and hurling medicine balls against walls. I’m no longer interested in getting stronger or bigger – we have a month left, maximum, for goodness sakes. But that doesn’t mean I’ve been sitting playing solitaire on my laptop (though win percentage is up to 15%). My focus is now on solidifying my body to make sure that each of the following Sundays my body is in the best shape it can be. We may well get knocked out but I’m making sure I’ll be there at the end for the pressure kicks. So instead of doing curls for girls, I’m doing proprioception work for my ankle ligaments to ensure they don’t break down, passing so many electrical impulses through myself my hair stands up and meditating on so many wobble boards my balance is now off the scale.

Tomorrow morning is the beginning of our ‘stage’. We’re spending Saturday and Sunday as a team, training, drinking, eating, barbequeing, and sleeping together. Yes, in the changing room. We begin out near Versailles, at La Boulie, more known for being an exclusive golf club, possibly the Racing Club de France club. There was great ribbing of our more aristocratic players who will have sampled the delightful greens. We train pretty much all day then all traverse Paris for Houilles, one of the nicer northern suburbs where we’ll barbecue and celebrate the birthday of ‘Betsen’ the crazy flanker. With sleeping bags at the ready we’ll pack down in the changing room and spend the night together, creating the sort of team unity that Toulon can only dream of! Sunday is more training then home to carte d’or vanilla in the early afternoon. That’s the plan, anyway.

I managed to bump the flatmate off the sofa this morning so I could enjoy the royal wedding. I closed all inter-connecting doors and sung to my heart’s content. I was gauging the mood towards the big day on Thursday and a surprising number were very interested. Who knows if they became frustrated and regretful over the events of 1789, cursing the revolutionaries, Robespierre et al. Or probably just more jealous of us not having someone like Sarko as a head of state. The only person I came across who was as excited as me was my Fijian friend who was still high with excitement this afternoon.

Even if my superficial mood and attitude to training fluctuates from the most motivated I’ve been all season to slipping back into the early season malaise, there is an inner drive that is appearing that I haven’t experienced since a similar stage in a competition last year. It’s more personal than last year, I don’t feel the same pressure from a community, and the way I interact with my teammates is different. That’s normal and to be expected. Initiatives like spending 36 hours in each others company aren’t things to dread. These guys are no just longer 21 weird foreign guys, and I’m sure the sharing of the changing room floor will be an absolute pleasure, bringing our l’esprit d’équipe to a level that Toulon won’t be able to live with...

First Round Ties

Here are the ties for the first knock-out round. Looks like Toulouse will be lying in wait if we get past Toulon. Doesn't get any bigger than that!

http://www.itsrugby.fr/phasefinale-crabos-2010-8.html

My Dodgy Wrists

This morning I was experiencing exactly what I've experienced every morning after I've returned to Paris after some time at home. Lack of motivation, dislike of rugby, longing for my mates and some chilly Edinburgh weather. But by the time I got into the club just after 2, it was straight back into the old routine. Sadly, the old routine does include popping up to the physio when I arrive. Recently it was just to say hello but today I wanted him to check out my wrist. 


From October to about March I carried quite a left wrist injury. No one could work out what it was but it was stopping me pulling out my huge hand-off, a huge part of my game when running at French back-rows. Less important was the decline in my left hand pass. I had x-rays, MRI scans and even went to see the a specialist, possibly THE specialist - President of the European Wrist Arthroscopy Society and a member of the American Society for Surgery of the Hand. This was after Christmas. I was managing to play and train, strapping up the wrist before each session, and dunking it in ice afterwards. He suggested some sort of injection but by the time it got round to this the pain had started to clear up.


I now have the pain in my right wrist and am doing much more than I did first time round in an effort to clear this up as soon as possible. So today I used the machine which emits hot electrical impulses. I held the wee thing on my wrist and the short term benefits were mightily impressive. It got sore again later on but at least it helped for a while. 


My vastly knowledgeable scrum-half was discussing the Old Firm derby today. I explained the background to the whole thing, the bomb threats and so on. We then discussed the fortunes of Hibs, which happens to be the 3rd and final Scottish football club that he knows. On top of all this, he has also been known to come up to me and name Scotland rugby players of days gone by..."Dougie Morgan"...."John Jeffrey"...."Roy Laidlaw".


It warms the heart. 

No regrets, please.

Written on Saturday. I’m back in Paris now, done the shopping, cleaning and going in this afternoon for some sort of session.

I fly back to Paris tomorrow. The last couple of weeks in Edinburgh have been really chilled, though I haven’t felt like I did when returning home in October or December where relief was a huge part of coming home. I’ve forgotten about rugby when I wanted to and played it, got stuck in when I wanted to. I played a social 7s tournament with friends which was the most fun I’ve had on a rugby pitch for a long time. I also noticed that I tackled harder at St Andrews than I have all season. You could say that’s a pretty sad indictment of how I feel playing for Racing, but I choose not to see it that way. I’m loyal and have built up friendships with these guys for over ten years so many of us found the same on Saturday, no matter what level we now play at. That’s just the way it is.

National duty with the under 20 A team was a fun three days, even if I was slightly hampered by little knocks picked up at the 7s where I threw myself around with reckless abandon – not regretted for a second, however. The sort of professional who finds himself a slave to pernickety contracts which state that he isn’t allowed to enjoy himself for fear of getting injured sounds like a dull soul indeed.

So my thoughts now turn to our rapidly approaching Championship run-in, beginning with Toulon on May 8^th. I’m not massively confident. I think having time to dwell on it for the past 2 weeks hasn’t been helpful. This French season is very stop-start, something I highlighted as a positive about a year ago, but which has since prevented me building up any momentum, especially when the French style doesn’t have set-plays and starter moves to fall back on after a 2 week break – you just ‘play’, and that is something that needs continual matches to settle into a decent rhythm.

I desperately don’t want my season to be over on May 8^th, or even May 16^th. I want to go out on a high. I want to swagger though the arrivals hall at Edinburgh airport very hungover with a medal round my kneck, wearing a silly blue and white striped Eden Park jumper and a peroxide blond hairdo. Anything less will feel like failure, even if it is glorious failure. I know I shouldn’t feel this way, and that in so many ways, this year has been ‘successful’ already. But I feel we deserve better. I do, however, look at our team and question whether we have the maturity to string together 4 consecutive outstanding performances. We have done it here and there, Clermont at home being the perfect example, but then we are prone (the pack in particular) to drop several levels the following week. It’s excruciatingly frustrating to play behind, especially when that first scrum creaks against a pack that we should demolish. I don’t know what goes on in their heads. When they (the heavies) do something well, they’re feted and appreciated like a dog who has just sat on command, but then gets a bit too excited, loses focus and defecates on the carpet.

Perhaps this is a function of the loss of our forwards coach in the political debacle earlier in the season. We now have two backs coaches, so maybe it’s impressive how we’ve got this far, and testament to our head coach who has seen his workload massively increase, having to sort out mauls and re-starts (which we deal with woefully) when he had maybe envisaged slick handling and offloads in the outside channels. I still see him gazing wistfully over to us gazelles laughing, throwing offloads out the back of the hand when our 2^nd row has again failed to pluck the ball out of the sky.

Stade Francais beat Racing...

It was said after the recent France/Scotland international that a team that has to win will always beat a team that merely wants to win. That was certainly the case against Stade Francais yesterday. It was a horror show. I can’t even remember the final score but with a penalty count of 23-7, we did well to come to within 10 points.

Stade knew that a win would guarantee their qualification for the final stages and they totally blitzed us. We were jaded and missing a few players, nowhere near the level that dominated Clermont 2 weeks ago.

It was the most ill-tempered match I have ever played in. I feel like I write that every week... This was proper derby rugby and there is no love lost between these two clubs, especially for the fans in the stand. It all flared up (on the pitch) in the second half with a huge brawl. After our Bourgoin brawl where I played a less than minor role, our coach had instructed us that if there is a ‘worry’, we are 15, together, 1974 Lions style (though he didn’t use that example). So, with me feeling a little guilty, and with his words ringing in my ears, I ran in. Not possessing the necessary mentality to whack someone, I stood next to my openside flank who was ploughing into someone in pink. He must have landed at least 6 punches. It was all I could do to make sure the referee didn’t see.

It was wonderful. I had to try and stop a smile. This was proper rugby, true animosity. I don’t condone fighting in rugby...actually that contradicts everything I’ve just said. But it was exciting to be a part of a game where the stakes where so high and the fellow players were at such a high level of sheer aggression that it spilt over like that. Some of these guys are street-fighters at heart. It’s not something for every week, but a part of me is pleased that it kicked off. After all, you’d be disappointed if a Stade/Racing game was dull and pleasant. We weren’t happy that only one of our players was carded, as usually it’s one for each side when such a mass fight takes place. The referee's logic was, "He was the most violent". This hulk will probably be playing 2nd row for France under 18.

The match ended with us just outside a score, despite a late rally getting us closer. Personally, my match is dominated by being totally and utterly steam-rollered by what can only be described as the next Mathieu Bastareaud. He looked like him and played like him. I console myself with the news that he played several games last year at the age of 17 for the pros in the Top 14 and was making his way back from a knee ligament injury. He came down my channel and the rest is symbolised by the crowd’s “ooooooohhhh”. I managed to explain to the physio after the game that nothing hurt except my pride.

Stade mocked our chasse a l’ours after the game in their victory celebrations which caused further unpleasantness. But we had the last laugh, safe in the knowledge that we had already qualified as 1^st in the pool, with a collective suspicion that a loss at this stage might be no bad thing, bringing us back down to earth, rejuvenating the work ethic in preparation for Toulon. So we went down into the shade behind the posts, the parents cracked open the champagne and their home-made cuisine and we sat around, chatting and bantering, letting the bubbly wash away what was, in reality, a highly frustrating, humbling afternoon. 

Pre-Holiday Elated Ramblings

Two of my wingers now have facebook profile pictures where they are in drag. ‘nuff said.

I went for my first French hair cut this week. This began awkwardly, with me explaining that I didn’t feel my French was good enough to describe the sort of haircut I wanted. He understood that he was to go slowly and keep asking questions. I helped him with this by regularly running my hand through my hair, looking doubtful until he asked, at which point I would direct his next move. He spent five minutes at the beginning thumbing through yesterday’s Parisien to find an article on Racing, proudly presenting it to me as he started to hack away at my sideburns. We got there in the end, proud that I can walk the streets shame-free. The middle-aged Korean in my class thought it was a bit ‘militaire’ which was well wide of the mark and a sad indictment on the Korean military.

It’s hard to deny that immediately before a holiday, la vie est belle. But today, I’m not sure if it was all that, I just felt comfortable, chilled in a way that I have felt more and more in the last month. For a start it was at least 25 degrees Celsius with not a cloud in the sky. I finished my final French class before the holidays, wearing an outrageous pair of shorts which revealed a pair of knees quite offensive to many of my class. I then headed into the club, admiring south Antony in the sun and oh so pleased that the large poster advertising an erotica exhibition has been changed to something else. My British sensibilities were being offended and it was simply too much in the early morning.

Left to my own devices to kick I passed a very pleasant 45 minutes going through the usual Friday routine with every kick I might need, never running for a ball, just pacing around the pitch in my own time, enjoying the shape of the ball and its bounces and occasionally scoring a brilliant try after a chip and gather and a step, as is my wont when no one is watching. When I start acting like this, it’s a sure sign that I am enjoying my rugby, such a difference from when I detested the very sight of the oval ball and only touched it when absolutely necessary.

I met one of the new players today, a Fijian brought in to cover for the injury to Juan Martin Hernandez. This 20 year old, brought up in England got a bit of a shock when I said “Alright” so he made the most of an English speaker. His last club was...Exeter. “Nice part of the world”, “Yeah, so I’m told...”

While watching the espoirs going through their team-run I was thinking about earlier on in the season when I thought I might have got moved up from the under 19s and was worrying about the standard etc and being out of my depth. But then it dawned on me that I was never going to be moved up. I was brought here to be the crabos stand-off. They realised they had a very talented generation but no stand-off, so I was lucky to come along at the right time to bag myself this whole gig. So my job is to facilitate the players around me. The club benefit from all that, and the benefits to me are evident. My development as a player, while important, hasn’t been looked at with a long-term view as it has with some of my mates who are sticking around. That’s fair enough, the crabos is a stepping stone for them in a way it isn’t for me, at least from a Racing point of view. Had I indicated that I would be staying then this would be different.

Here’s a quote from an unnamed pro: “France. Crazy people, crazy rugby, crazy country. The only good thing is the money.”

Toulon...Stade Francais...Cricket

The RC Toulon side who won the French Championship in 1931. But the challenge that lies in front of us first is a considerable one. Had it been anyone other than the Stade then we might have been slacking off this week. Training this evening was odd, our injury list is piling up and we need the our break to mend bodies. We had a good run around though. I got very excited as we were driving past the Bois de Boulogne and saw a cricket match taking place. I squealed to everyone else in the bus but they obviously didn't share my excitement, apart from one disparaging comment about Asians. I was turning my arm over in my idiosyncratic off-spin style all through training - everyone just thought I was warming up for the contact, none the wiser. The quote from training is: "You're a true Scot. You pass, you stop." A very valid summing up of Scottish rugby, which I told him. 


I can't believe it's got this far through the year and I haven't mentioned our Belgian prop. I suppose I never considered him a foreigner, not a real one at least. He's a lovely guy, humble and quietly destructive, as all the best props are of course.


It's personal on Sunday, bragging rights at stake, (especially for those who have worn the colours of both Parisian clubs) as they have been every time the Racing and Stade have met since 1892. Try tackling this monstrosity. 


You can read about the last match against Stade Francais here, or just look at the pictures:
http://fraser-gillies-10.blogspot.com/2011/01/racing-metro-14-3-stade-francais.html

Looking Ahead to the Knock-Out Rounds

Gg			Pts		J		G		N		P		P.		C.		+/-		BO		BD
1	Racing Metro 92		69		17		15		0		2		466		128		338		6		2
2	Bourgoin		61		17		13		0		4		419		197		222		6		3
3	Clermont		60		17		13		0		4		475		213		262		6		2
4	Stade Français		57		17		12		0		5		422		193		229		7		2

Group 2

1	Grenoble		67		17		15		1		1		465		154		311		5		0
2	USAP		62		17		13		0		4		431		187		244		7		3
3	Montpellier		59		17		12		0		5		409		186		223		6		4
4	Toulon		54		17		11		0		6		438		211		227		7		3

So now everyone starts to look at the other pools to work out who will play who in the first knock-out round of 16, the 8^th as the French call it. Almost certainly we will be heading to Lyon to play Toulon. That will be a clash of cultures if ever there was one.

To whet the appetite, I worked out the other possible matches, with one round left to play of course.

Racing Metro – Toulon

Bourgoin – Montpellier

Perpignan – Clermont

Grenoble – Stade Francais

Toulouse – Bordeaux

Colomiers – Pau

Tarbes – Bayonne

Brive – Agen

This will probably only make sense to the rugby connoisseur/romantic but it makes quite exciting reading. I make no apologies for getting ahead of myself. If you’d told me in September that I would be in April getting excited about the final stages I would have groaned doubtfully.

If I were Stuart Barnes, Miles Harrison and Lazenby himself then I’d be getting excited about the month of May. I have no intention of heading back to a summer in Edinburgh wondering what might have been and letting our glory day in the sun pass us by.

On another note, my scrum-half friend – not our captain who sometimes plays centre – will be joining Brive next season. Having been at Racing since he was a little boy, the club haven’t offered him anything for next season so he is forced to seek pastures new. His lineage is part of French rugby and Racing royalty, wears a lot of Eden Park clothing, if that’s a hint, and impressively manages to laugh off suggestions of nepotism. Definitely one I’ll be keeping in touch with.

Racing 38 - 7 Dijon Chalonnais

Top spot has been secured after a faltering yet comfortable win against Chalon, just down the road from Dijon. After ten minutes, they thought they were in for a shot at a win but a couple of quick tries put paid to their early keenness. We never really looked back, even if our level of intensity slipped and the game became a scrappy poor-quality affair with neither team looking like scoring.

I spent most of the game panting like a St Bernard in the Nevada Desert. It was hot, too hot, sweat was dripping into my eyes and the glare didn’t seem to be affecting everyone else like it was me.

Still, I had a pleasingly average game. We profited well from 2 nicely judged up and unders, passes went to hand and nailed all the conversions. We had a new centre combination and were missing our fireball of a flanker who always adds some zip around the pitch so it was a decent enough result, even if we did let in a try right on the final whistle.

As a result of our frustrations near the end and out of respect to the tradition, we didn’t perform the chasse a l’ours as we didn’t feel our performance merited it. I made the point to a couple that I had actually been quite worried about this game. In every team I’ve played in, the week after a huge victory is an incredibly tricky one. The Racing professionals lost in Bayonne in a similar situation and I felt that we might fall victim today to a team who had beaten Clermont earlier in the season.

So it’s satisfying to have wrapped up a bonus point win. We can now look forward to Stade Francais next week before a much-needed 2 week break. 

Whisky, Digestives and Dijon Mustard

I didn’t get in that long ago from training. This is due to what is becoming a habitual Friday evening beer with my old friend at the club. First we went to the training ground where the bar was showing Perpignan vs. Toulouse. We watched the last 20 minutes before moving on to the Hotel de Berny where my grubby training clothes were excused as anything Racing rules in this bar/restaurant, the classiest place in North Antony.

In the minibus on the way back from training, I whipped out my half-eaten packet of Digestive biscuits – as post-training snacks go, it’s a winner. When it comes to offering them round, I am now a true Frenchman, jovial and generous. There was once a time when I lived up to my nation’s reputation and held my biscuits in a tight-fist. You have to imagine saying ‘biscuit’ in French, “biskwee”...

I offered them round, “Biscuit, mon gar?”

“Whisky? Non, pas pour moi”

 “Now now my friend, I’m all for stereotypes, and certainly post-training refreshment, occasionally alcoholic, but I am not in the habit of carrying a bottle of whisky in my bag for a post-training tipple”

Oh how we laughed.

Autographs

I walked out of the gym on Wednesday for kicking practice to be met by a mob of young’uns. They were hungry for blood. I paid them no attention and made my way to the pitch but they blocked my way. They surrounded me, thrusting their white t-shirt and books in my face. I tried to explain that if they cared to look at their posters then they wouldn’t find me, that I was nobody, literally the most ‘nobody’ at the club. Of course, my broken French only convinced them that I was something exotic. “You speak English? I speak English. You big star.”

Me being such a gentle soul, I decided not to resort to violence to get myself out of this situation, so I signed one t-shirt and one book. These two cleared off, leaving me a passage to freedom. I only just managed to fit my head through the gap they left...

So we head to Dijon on Sunday. 7.30 am meet. Ugh. This is our match in hand and if we win then we have assured ourselves 1^st position in the pool. If we win then it is practically sure that our opponents in the first knock-out round will be...........Toulon. It’s hard not to think about May 8^th already. But a trip to Lyon (neutral venue) is a mouthwatering one. For now, I will have to content myself with the not so mouthwatering thought of Dijon Mustard. Yuck.