Non-stop season to challenge the best
NO ONE has ever denied – no one has ever been able to deny – that the French rugby season is an ultra-marathon rather than a sprint. But when the World Cup comes around it takes on ferocious ironman triathlon levels.
The current Top 14 season kicked off on Saturday, September 4, 2022. It will end, for seven teams, on Sunday, May 28, 2023, when all matches on the final round of the campaign kick off at the same time.
But for the top six sides, and the 13th-placed side in the French top flight, there’s still between one and three matches of post-season rugby to play. The campaign only winds up for the finalists, in Saint-Denis late on Saturday, June 17, when one side will lift the Bouclier de Brennus, and the now-ubiquitous Freed From Desire will play out for the victors and will be the soundtrack of frustrated disappointment for the losers.
Just 63 days later, on Saturday, August 19, the 2023-24 Top 14 campaign gets under way, for those players not involved in the World Cup.
It’s not the shortest period between domestic seasons in France – the 2016-17 campaign, for example, kicked off less than two months after a certain Dan Carter had guided 14-player Racing 92 to the Brennus in Barcelona at the end of the World Cup-affected 201516 season.
But it still doesn’t leave much time for players to rest and recuperate from one arduous campaign before they have to start prepping for another. Remember, in those 63 days, players will have to fit in a holiday, pre-season, and warm-up games.
August 19 is also two days before Fabien Galthie is due to announce his final 33-player squad for the World Cup. And it coincides with the third of France’s four tournament warm-up matches. They play Scotland, in Edinburgh and Saint-Etienne, then Fiji in Nantes, before finishing up their preparations against Australia in Saint-Denis on August 27.
At this point it’s probably time to backtrack just a little to demonstrate just how tight the schedule is for players, and not just those in France, this year, which is likely to be one of the most important of many careers.
As the current season races to a close, Galthie and the France staff – in common with their counterparts in the other 19 teams heading to France in September – are picking up a head of steam.
France’s first World Cup training camp runs from June 5 to June 9, minus those players still involved in domestic competition.
Galthie will announce his extended 42-player squad on June 21. There’s a two-day gathering just outside Marseille between June 26 and 28, and 12 days of training in and around Monaco from July 2 to 14. The squad heads back to Marcoussis from July 24 to August 3, and is in Capbreton between August 7 and 25.
International digression over. For obvious reasons, next season’s full fixture list is still to be confirmed – promotion and relegation matters are still far from being decided, for a start – but the LNR this week released a bare bones calendar for the new campaign.
Expect to see the full programme, before TV scheduling arranges each weekend’s fixture list, sometime in mid-summer, when many players will be deep in World Cup preparation.
By the time the World Cup gets under way, on September 8, the Top 14 will be three rounds in, with 24 to go. The second-tier ProD2 will have played four rounds, having kicked off the same week in August.
The reason for the early start to the campaign is to allow the Top 14 to take a break for the World Cup itself before returning the day after the final. Between October 29 and December 23, there will be seven Top 14 rounds and the first two Champions and Challenge Cup weekends.
The ProD2, meanwhile, shorn of numerous internationals, will carry on its merry five-on-one-off way and fit in four rounds during the seven-week World Cup window.
For extra fun, France’s SuperSevens tournament – usually a pre-season and November internationals teaser competition involving squads from Top 14 clubs and a couple of invitational sides – takes place over four weekends in Clermont, Lyon, Pau and Paris during the quadrennial competition.
Five Top 14 rounds are scheduled for the 2024 Six Nations window, three of which will take place on the weekends France play Ireland, Italy and Wales – while January, April and May will be divided, as they always are, between domestic and Champions and Challenge Cup action.The ProD2 season hits the play-off stage at the end of May and finishes in early June.
The Top 14’s regular season ends on the weekend of June 8, 2024, with the final, in Marseille because the Stade de France will be in full Olympics preparation, scheduled for Saturday, June 29. That’s a total of 316 days – more than 10 months – after the first ball was kicked in anger.
For some, it’s not over. Then, Fabien Galthie will take what’s very likely to be a very new-look squad on a two-Test tour of Argentina, which ends on July 13. Because of likely post-World Cup retirements, injuries and his policy of giving key players a break, expect to see a fair few new faces by the time the July tour comes around.
Those players who went to Argentina with the France squad will, finally, be able to enjoy some down time. But, by then, most club squads will be back in pre-season for the 2024/25 campaigns.
“Players will not have much time to rest and recuperate between arduous rugby campaigns”