Ben Tameifuna told Planet Rugby that his move to the second row is a stopgap of ‘two or three weeks’, and that he nearly wandered back into the front row more than once.
Ten tries, a 36-36 draw and a 148kg tighthead who’d just played the best part of an hour at lock. Tameifuna came through the mixed zone still in his kit, asked for a cup of tea, and gave the most honest account of the night anybody in a UBB shirt was going to give.
“It’s obviously not the result we wanted,” he said. “As a group we felt like we let ourselves down in the first half. We gave them the ball too much and we missed too many tackles, but our attitude in the second half was much better and we stayed in the fight till the end. It’s a bit bittersweet; it’s not a loss, but we’ll take the learnings and we’ve got a big week next week.”
The missed tackles aren’t a figure of speech. UBB made 130 tackles to Gloucester’s 101 and missed 24 of them, and Gloucester had 66 per cent of the ball and 64 per cent of the territory before the break. “Gloucester are top of the table in the Prem for a reason,” Tameifuna said. “They’re a top outfit. With a team like that and the players they have, you can’t afford to give them that much space and time.”
“I had to remind myself I was in the second row.”
The lock experiment is the thing everybody wanted to ask him about, and the answer is that it was never meant to be a career move. “It was different,” he said. “Definitely a bit more running than there is at tighthead. I’ll look back at the video tonight or tomorrow morning and see where I can improve. Next week’s another week, and I’m just grateful for the opportunity to try something new and adapt to the situation.”
Was this the start of something? “Whatever’s best for the team. I’m a team guy, and if it’s me for the next two or three weeks until the real locks come back, then so be it. I enjoyed my time out there. There were a few times I almost stepped into the front line and had to remind myself I was in the second row.”
He’d done his homework. “Everything was new. I tried to get as much info as I could from the locks, and I tried to give the pressure that you get as a prop, flip the script a bit. I kept the conversation going with Sipili, asking him if he wanted more or less, and most of the time he gave me a good nod. I’ll look at the footage and see what we can fix, but it was different, it was exciting, and all I can do is rise to the occasion when those things happen.”
The footage will tell him what the numbers already say. The Gloucester scrum finished at 100 per cent success to UBB’s 67; Dian Bleuler took Falatea apart on the tighthead side in the fourteenth minute and the Max Llewellyn try came straight off it. The maul was the other side of the ledger: UBB’s drive absorbed three Gloucester lineout mauls in the first half, and it was only after Tameifuna went off at 57 that the home maul started going forward. He made the maul and he cost the scrum, and he knows which one the video will show first.
Then the end. Gloucester knocked on at their own lineout on the UBB 22 at 78 and a half minutes, Gianluca Gnecchi reset the scrum that followed rather than award the penalty UBB felt they’d earned, the reset was knocked on, and the whistle went at 36-36. Tameifuna was off the pitch by then, but he’d seen enough.
“I felt like the refereeing in the Top 14 and the Champions Cup is a bit different,” he said, choosing his words. “I felt like we were going on the front foot there, and maybe what I see is different from how the referee sees it. That’s just the way the game is, and you can’t really do much about it.”
“A team like Gloucester; they’ll just punish you.”
I put it to him that for twenty minutes of the second half UBB simply didn’t exit, and that both Will Trenholm tries came off that refusal to clear the 22. He didn’t argue. “You can’t afford to let a team like Gloucester into their red zone. We put that pressure on ourselves. We can’t give easy ball like that to a team like Gloucester; they’ll just punish you.”
The week hadn’t helped. Four of his teammates, Louis Bielle-Biarrey among them, were held at Bristol Airport on Thursday over travel authorisations tied to renewed passports, and it took the French embassy to get them cleared. “All these little one percenters come into effect on a game day,” he said. “But with the talent we have and the mental streak the boys have, you park that and prepare as well as you can. We can’t afford to let little things outside the field affect us on the field.” Nor, he said, had anybody talked about the artificial surface, despite French sides’ record on plastic over the last two seasons. “We knew it was synthetic and it was going to be running rugby, and it was actually a nice night for it, not too windy, not really wet. But we just prepared as a normal game.”
The dressing room, he said, was quiet. “You come to places like this and you expect to win. It was a bit quiet, but that goes to show the boys care about this tournament and this team, and we knew that wasn’t the standard we’re supposed to be at. Hopefully that’s the platform we rise from.” Part of it was fatigue: a six-day turnaround, a reshuffled line-up, a prop at lock. “We can’t let those things creep into our game, but I’m pretty proud of the boys’ effort to stay in the fight right to the 80th minute.”
One last number, because it deserves one. Maxime Lucu, a scrum-half captaining from fly-half, kicked 803 metres on the night, within 140 metres of the entire Gloucester side. I told Tameifuna I’d never seen anything like it. “We’re aware of the talent he has with his boot, off his left as well as his right,” he said. “We can’t really stop him doing it. It gets us in the right part of the field, and it’s a lot of running for the big boys. But the game’s just getting faster and faster these days.”
And with that he went to find his tea. “Big shift, mate.” It was.