Following Toulouse’s 43-40 win over Exeter Chiefs in the opening round of the Champions Cup at the Stadium de Toulouse on Sunday, here are our five takeaways from a game that changed hands seven times and was settled by the last kick of the afternoon.
The top line
What a game; a Test match in all but name.
Honestly, by the hour mark you’d given up trying to keep count of the cards, the lead changes and the bodies on the physio’s table, and just sat back and watched two sides go at each other with a ferocity that belonged in November at the Stade de France rather than a pool game in October.
Consider where Toulouse were at 42 minutes. They’d started without Thomas Ramos, Julien Marchand, Thibaud Flament, Emmanuel Meafou and Jack Willis, which is most of the French spine; they’d lost Rodrigue Neti to a red card at 19 minutes for a shoulder into Ross Vintcent’s head; Santiago Chocobares had failed an HIA and Tommaso Menoncello had done his wrist, both inside two minutes of the restart, so Antoine Dupont was at fly-half, Romain Ntamack at 12 and Paul Graou feeding the scrum; and they were 26-24 down to a side that had held the ball through 94 rucks and had just helped itself to two tries in four minutes whilst Toulouse had 13 men on the park.
From there they scored 19 points, two of the tries from inside their own half, and won because Henry Slade, of all people, drew a left-footed penalty wide with the clock dead. Make no mistake, Exeter were a tad unlucky; nobody from outside France has won at this ground in over four years and they came within a kick of it, and on balance they probably should have. But the citadel stands, and Toulouse, with a man short for 61 minutes and two short for ten, made 167 tackles at 87 per cent, kicked 546 metres to Exeter’s 362, and never once stopped trying to play.
Timeless fashion
The Paris Fashion Week Autumn look in French rugby, with the second rows all on the treatment table, appears to be a prop at lock, very much in vogue. Ben Tameifuna wore it for Bordeaux at Gloucester on Friday and admitted afterwards he’d nearly packed down in the front row a couple of times out of habit; Joel Merkler wore it for Toulouse today, for the second week running, and here’s the thing about that: a prop pushes down, five degrees below the horizon, whilst a lock pushes up, and asking an international tighthead to change the angle of his life for an afternoon is harder than it looks.
Then Neti went, and Ugo Mola did something that was bizarre for about ten seconds and clever ever after. Off came Dorian Aldegheri, whose scrummaging is all about winning the hit and pincering in at an angle rather than raw power; Merkler went back to tighthead where his hips belong, Benjamin Bertrand came on at loosehead and a back-rower went to five. In other words, the moment the scrum became the whole game, the prop went back to being a prop. Within ten minutes Exeter were being penalised for offside as Toulouse carried through them for Joshua Brennan’s try; at 33 minutes the seven-man pack shoved Exeter clean off their own ball, Théo Ntamack picked up, Dupont went over the top and Teddy Thomas scored. A reshuffled scrum, a man down, and it won them a try. That’s a club that knows what a scrum is for.
The look did date, mind. Georges-Henri Colombe came on for the last quarter and the final scrum of the afternoon melted under him, which is where Slade’s kick came from. Fatigue as much as technique, after an hour of 14-man defending, but it’ll be the first clip in the Monday meeting.
One shoulder, two cards
Neti’s red was the right call and a dreadful one to have to give, arm tucked, contact to the head, the tackle the game’s trying to get rid of. What matters for Toulouse is what it did to the rest of the afternoon, because the second card was wired to the first.
With a body gone from the line, Mola moved Dupont into the fold, defending at 13 and 14 rather than sweeping, and that held the line beautifully, Toulouse scoring 12 points with 14 men, but it left nobody at home. So when Vintcent broke at 36 minutes and Exeter had six on two down the outside, Thomas’s only option was to slap the pass down and take the yellow. He had to do it. Exeter then scored twice in four minutes against 13, Greg Fisilau off a lineout and Stephen Varney from the restart, running a kick-off back when it would’ve been easier to manage it, and Toulouse went in at the break behind at home, which is not something the locals are used to.
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The chain didn’t stop at half-time either. Both centres went, Dupont went to ten, and at 48 minutes he was charged down by Vintcent, the man whose head had cost Neti his afternoon, for Will Butt to score. Add three missed conversions, six points in a three-point game, and that’s the bill for one shoulder at 19 minutes: a yellow, a charge-down, 12 points in four minutes and a scoreboard that should never have been that close.
Rock-free, and like a rocket
The pre-match worry was Thomas Ramos, because without him Toulouse lose their second fly-half, the man who lets Ntamack play flat because somebody behind can still run the field, and Matias Remue was read as a runner standing in for a playmaker. Well. Remue, the Belgian international, beat seven defenders, which was the most on the park by a distance, made 87 metres, set up two tries and scored two, the second from Dupont’s pass with an in-and-out and a step off his left foot that left the Exeter cover clutching at the Toulouse air. He was the one shaft of light when they were seven down and the man who put them back in front at 71.
And then there’s the try. Trapped in their own 22 at 56 minutes, 14 men, five behind, Dupont threw a back-door offload that had no business being thrown, Ange Capuozzo took it, and Romain Ntamack finished it 90 metres later, then kicked the conversion having missed two. It was rugby from the gods, a try so good you wanted to write it out in fountain pen on vellum and frame it, and it told you everything about this mighty club. Two centres gone, a prop sent off, a scrum-half at ten, and they still just want to play rugby. They can’t help themselves.
Dupont at ten, for the record, was phenomenal. A scrum-half at first receiver for 38 minutes against the side that keeps the ball longer than anyone in England, and he ran the game from there: 45 passes, 11 kicks for 272 metres, which was half Toulouse’s kicking on his own, the steal off Varney at 74 minutes with timing rather than force, and the pass that started the try of the year. The charge-down’s on the same ledger and he’d be the first to say so. Théo Ntamack carried 14 times with 11 over the gainline and was the broadcaster’s man of the match; Thomas made five clean breaks and won two turnovers to go with his yellow; and François Cros, on his 50th Champions Cup appearance, made 17 tackles, dropped the first restart and generally looked like a man who’d had a word with himself. Efraín Elías made 16 and missed none.
A word, too, for Exeter’s three. Varney ran for more metres than anyone, passed 72 times, box-kicked beautifully, put Zack Wimbush in with a pass over the top and scored one himself; Butt was the most direct carrier on the field; Wimbush scored a hat-trick in a game his side lost by three. Kane James came off the bench and won a turnover five metres from his own line at 77 minutes that had no right to be won. Exeter were magnificent, and they’ll be sick as parrots.
Looking ahead
Exeter will take two things home. The first is that for 75 minutes they were the better side at a ground where nobody wins, and that at the end, from a scrum that had just gone through Toulouse’s replacement front row, they chose the posts and the draw rather than the corner that had failed them twice. Rob Baxter will defend that, and he’ll be right to, because a point from Toulouse is more than most sides get, but the dropped ball on halfway at 79 and the lineout throw a minute later are the ones that’ll hurt. The second is Slade’s kick, left-footed from the wrong side, drawing a couple of metres in tired legs and staying out. He’d kicked well all afternoon. It was a hundred against club bowling and a duck in the Test match, and he’ll know it.
Toulouse have a different problem. They’re six-time champions struggling to find a fit 15, and today added a failed HIA, a broken wrist and a prop facing a ban to a list that already had the spine of the French team on it. They can win like this, with a scrum-half at ten and a back-rower at lock; the question for the club before the pool resumes in December is how many more times they’ll have to.
The last word belongs to the ground. Four and a half years, and counting. This was a win with its foundation in sheer rugby belief, the belief that six EPCR titles gives you, and in the end that was the nous that separated them.