TOONY: MADE IN FRANCE
Headbutts from the head coach, trampled on by his own forwards and ‘the scariest man I have ever met in my life’... but French connection had a massive impact on Scotland coach’s rugby philosophy
WHEN he has them rolling in the aisles with tales of being trampled on by his own pack in the Brive dressing room, the forwards all under strict orders from the head coach to give their team-mate a right shoeing, Gregor Townsend always stresses he has never used any of the famously furious French ‘psyche-up’ exercises in his own non-playing career.
All who have worked for him at Glasgow, and now Scotland, can breathe a sigh of relief that some of the funniest moments of Townsend’s after-dinner routine remain just that: comic relief used to illustrate the insanity of his time playing in France.
The seasons he spent at Brive, Castres and Montpellier left the national team coach with an abiding love of a country, a people and a lifestyle, his personal Auld Alliance strengthened by the fact he was already a huge fan of French rugby before he moved there from Northampton.
And he’ll tell you he benefited enormously from playing in such a hothouse environment for almost half of his club career.
Born in Gala, Townsend’s club career also took him to Australia, England and, at the very end, South Africa.
But there’s an argument to be made that, in terms of overall influence, Toony was ‘fabrique en France.’
As Scotland head to Paris later this week, then, the bilingual Scot will relish the chance to answer questions in fairly fluent French, while he won’t be able to turn a corner at the Stade de France without bumping into an old pal or two.
And, while he’ll be entirely preoccupied with the minutiae of his plan to bring down Les Bleus, he wouldn’t be human if his thoughts didn’t drift back to those crazy ‘very scary’ early days at Brive.
Working under head coach Laurent Seigne, the former France prop with a distinctly old-fashioned approach to motivation, Townsend admitted to being stunned from the outset.
The Scot, who gleefully describes Seigne as ‘the scariest man I’d ever met in my life’, explained: ‘Before games, the dressing room was a scary place. Back in Scotland, we used to get psyched up, maybe slapping ourselves in the face. Over there, he took the responsibility — and would slap you in the face himself.
‘The first time I saw it, he was over with the forwards and started fighting with some of them. They knew it was coming, so they would fight back.
‘T-shirts were ripped, there was blood. And I thought: “I’m glad I’m not a forward”. Two weeks later, he called me and another centre over to toughen us up…’
In his excellent autobiography,
Talk of the Toony, penned without recourse to a ghost writer, Townsend takes up the tale of how he and Argentine team-mate Lisandro Arbizu were called to the middle of the dressing room.
As the coach repeated his oft-heard mantra about wanting his centres to be as hard as the forwards, the unlucky 12-13 pairing were ordered to lie on the floor. And then the whole pack was told to stampede over them.
‘When some of them didn’t stand on us, Seigne would intervene and do it himself, telling the forwards to make sure they stepped hard on the two centres,’ wrote Townsend.
‘Lisandro and I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.’
The thought that being roughed up immediately before kick-off would have a benefit to players may seem odd.
Yet, to Townsend’s surprise, a lot of his French team-mates enjoyed being challenged with such aggression in the moments before taking the field. Not all of them, though.
Recalling coming into the dressing room late on one occasion, having been outside passing with his scrum-half,
Before games at Brive the dressing room was a scary place to be
The coach had headbutted him but it was even worse at other clubs
Townsend revealed: ‘You could just tell something had gone wrong. We get in the huddle, I looked directly across at our winger, who had blood pouring from a head wound.
‘I guessed what had happened. As we were running out, I asked what had happened — and he said the coach had headbutted him.
‘So the head coach had headbutted the smallest player in the team. Because he expected him to play well after that.
‘Then the captain told me this wasn’t as bad as other clubs…
‘Stade Francais, their head coach was Bernard Laporte, now the president of French Rugby.
‘When they were in the changing room for the psyche up, he would turn lights off and put the showers on at full heat.
‘So the changing room was steam and darkness, no one would see what was going on.
‘He got the openside flanker to punch guys in the dark. And this was what he thought would psyche them up.
‘It stopped because somebody apparently knocked out the openside flanker.’
Another club boss would apparently get his assistant to flick the lights on and off during the pre-match punch-up, having read that a strobe effect can send people into a frenzy. What’s French for ‘utterly bonkers’?
The thing that really had Townsend confused, though, was the application of rules. Some were there to be broken, apparently. Others had to be adhered to with a rigidity befitting a branch of the military.
‘Many in France see rugby as war in all but name,’ he wrote in the book. ‘And, as such, the players have to behave as if they’re in the army.
‘The look that Seigne gave Olivier Magne and myself for giggling on a bus before a match was one that said: “If any of you two even think about smiling again before a game, I will rip your teeth out with my bare hands”.
‘We weren’t even allowed to smile the day before away matches when we were together in a hotel.’
Between that and opposition tactics described as akin to ‘a guerrilla ambush’, complete with gouging and stamping, you might wonder why the Scotland and Lions star stuck it out for so long in France.
The truth? The worst of the madness didn’t last beyond that first season. And he loved the place. He adored the culture, had enormous affection for the rugby, respected the traditions that made the club game so full-on in the south-west.
One of the most important tenets of French philosophy stuck with Townsend, to the extent that he created a sub-heading in his chapter on playing in France.
‘Never lose a home game,’ was his advice to anyone looking to forge a career in the game there.
Now that is something he’d love to replicate at BT Murrayfield, where the home record is impressive but not quite perfect.
This weekend, the Scots will throw themselves hell-for-leather at their chaos-wracked hosts, knowing that we haven’t recorded a victory in Paris since 1999.
As riven with division and despair as they may be, the French always seem to raise themselves at home; the bruising experience of two seasons ago a reminder of that.
So maybe Townsend has to find a way of preparing his players for the brutality of the opening 15 minutes. Perhaps he needs to dip into his vast experience in search of new/old methods.
‘Right then, centres, on the deck. Now, forwards, don’t hold back. Or I’ll nut you …’