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.