TOULOUSE SHOWING SIGNS OF LIFE AGAIN
Leinster facing a side on the up after spell off their brilliant best
SUNDAY’S showdown between Toulouse and Leinster at the Stade Ernest Wallon is being teed up as the official changing of the guard in European rugby.
Last May, Leinster equalled the French side’s record of four European Cup titles and look well set to forge ahead and become the first side to win the title five times.
Leinster are unquestionably the elite club outfit in the northern hemisphere — a status once owned by Toulouse, whose name is inextricably linked with all the romance associated with European rugby’s flagship competition.
Toulouse invested in the European competition from the off. They won the inaugural title in 1996 and have always bucked the French trend of borderline disinterest by pursuing the goal of becoming European champions with the same zeal they carried into domestic campaigns.
You could rely on Toulouse to bring glamour and menace to their European outings and they were generally among the favourites at the start of every season, their four titles (1996, 2003, 2005 and 2010) underscored by secondplace finishes in 2004 and 2008 and four other losing semi-final appearances (1997, 1998, 2000 and 2011).
However, since that 2011 loss to Joe Schmidt’s Leinster, Toulouse have not been the European force of old, begging the question: where are they ahead of Sunday’s encounter?
Last Wednesday provided a clue. France coach Jacques Brunel announced a 31man squad for the November Tests containing the names of just three Toulouse players.
A far cry from the days when Toulouse would dominate successful French squads, of the present trio — hooker Julien Marchand, scrum-half Antoine Dupont and winger Maxime Medard — only Medard would be considered worthy of mention alongside the great players to have donned the famous red and black jersey.
It reflects a decline in the fortunes of a club who have not tasted domestic success since 2012 and have gone eight years since their last European Cup success. In fact, they did not even contest the Champions Cup last season, forced into the after-thought ignominy of the Challenge Cup, where they did not even manage to make the knockout stages — a deeply embarrassing state of affairs for a club with such a rich history of achievement and particularly galling for director of rugby Fabien Pelous, legendary French second-row and a figurehead on the great Toulouse teams from the mid-1990s to the late 2000s. Pelous (left), along with head coach Ugo Mola (another Toulouse hero of yore) had the difficult task of taking over from his long-time mentor Guy Noves. Known as ‘Mr Toulouse’, Noves drove the club to unprecedented heights over a storied 22 years from 1993 to 2015, when he left to take over the national team. Noves may have flopped with France — his old-school, laissez faire approach out of synch with the scientific demands of the modern game — but his record with Toulouse and the status it afforded him is unimpeachable. Nine French Championships, and those four European Cups, established Noves as the finest, and most decorated, coach in European club history and an impossible act to follow.
However, Pelous is determined to restore the aura that once surrounded Toulouse in the Noves glory years and believes he has the club on the right track.
When Toulouse finished third from bottom in the Top14 in 2017, there were rumours Pelous would be forced to quit but he quashed them defiantly while revealing that his role would be altered, stepping back from hands-on involvement with the senior team to work on ‘training structures’.
Pelous, a former France Under20 coach, realised the feeders systems into the club needed to be improved, along with preparation practices which had seen players fall behind in rugby’s rapidly changing tactical stakes.
He also placed a heavy focus on reacquiring the sense of identity which had been lost amid a high turnover of players and over-reliance on foreign imports.
‘We need to give a common goal to the players and we have failed on that,’ said Pelous. ‘I am interested in deep building, I want to do things that last.’
It was a far-sighted approach that began to pay immediate dividends. Last season, their Challenge Cup involvement was regarded as an irrelevant sideshow, beyond the opportunity to
rest frontliners, and Toulouse went hard in the Top14, finishing third in the table before being beaten by eventual champions Castres in the knockout stages.
This season, aside from a 66-15 hammering in Montpellier, they have made a decent start with four wins and a draw from seven outings.
Last weekend’s Champions Cup victory in Bath was a massive morale boost. They may have needed a Freddie Burns implosion to get the win but the way Toulouse celebrated their twopoint triumph left no doubt about how much Europe still means to the club and they enter Sunday’s contest against the champions in good heart rather than shrouded in a cloud of foreboding.
Losing All Black backrow Jerome Kaino and prop Lucas Pointud to suspension has not helped their prospects against a seemingly impregnable Leinster outfit and their current squad does not contain anything like the quality of the great players of the Noves era (see panel), but Toulouse showed against Bath that it would be folly to take them lightly.
South African Cheslin Kolbe is a superstar on the wing, Medard is looking as sharp as ever and there is meat in the forwards in the shape of All Black prop Charlie Faumuina, doughty Italian hooker Leonardo Ghiraldini and secondrows Joe Tekori and Selevasio Tolofua.
Perhaps most encouragingly, in terms of the long-term sustainability aims of the Toulouse project, there is young French talent coming through also — most notably in the case of skilful out-half Romain N’tamack, son of Toulouse and France legend Emile.
That said, while a raucous Stade Ernest Wallon will help bridge the gap, Toulouse are still a ways off Leinster and victory is highly unlikely.
Leo Cullen’s side have grabbed the mantle of being Europe’s premier force and maybe their opponents will never reclaim that exalted level but, after a torrid period in their illustrious history, Toulouse are showing signs of life again.